Monday, November 10, 2008

Archie Rewrites History Again

I happened to leaf through an Archie digest in the supermarket checkout line yesterday (what? the other stuff in the checkout line isn't better, and I might as well look to see if I can find some old Samm Schwartz or Harry Lucey art) and the first thing I saw was a story I remembered reading as a kid, some kind of meta-story where the editor tells Archie about a story written for him by the actual writer of the story, Rich Margopoulos. (Don't ask me how I remembered the name; it just stuck with me for some reason.) Simple enough. Except that writer is no longer with Archie comics, so in this digest reprint, the writer's name has been changed to Dan Parent, one of the current staff writer/artists at Archie comics.

I never thought the Archie people could top their Soviet-style disappearing of Dan DeCarlo, but this one is even better; not only have they removed the name of a defector, but they've transferred the credit for the story to someone who didn't write it. Is that even legal?

And as an added bit of craziness, while the speech balloons are altered to remove Mr. Margopoulos's name, the brilliant rewrite people at Archie forgot to change the name on the script being held up in the first panel -- which still reads "R. Margopoulos."

Anybody want to take bets on the next bit of history that the Archie digest s will scrub from their pages? Maybe they'll take one of those Christian Sabrina stories and change "God" to "Wiccan God or Goddess." It's about time somebody stood up for Sabrina's actual religion.

1 comment:

Kenny said...

Those bastards. I remember that Rich Margopoulos story. It first ran in an issue of Everything's Archie. It always stuck in my head how much his name sounded like "rich Marco Polo."

Did Margopoulos also have an acrimonious breakup with Archie Comics? What gives?

Archie Comics joke revisionism is always to make things blander -- if they went after Sabrina they would probably make her not a witch, just a "magic girl."