Review: "Archie, Vol. 6" by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok

Archie, Vol. 6 by Mark Waid and Audrey Mok
Published October 2018 via Archie Comics
★★★

This is the end: It's the spring dance, and although the only romance in the air is between Moose and Midge, everyone is determined to have a good time...just, one of those "everyone" people is determined to have a good time by holding the school hostage at gunpoint.

So...here we are. I liked that Betty and Veronica are fast friends in this—they've both put Archie aside, at least for now, though they're both resigned to the possibility that that might not be forever. I like that the point of this last collection in the series really isn't romance, despite the could-be-romantic setting of the dance.

But oooof the gun plotline rubs me the wrong way. This was published in 2018—the same year as the Parkland high school shooting that left seventeen people dead; the same year as a shooting in a Santa Fe school that left ten dead—and it just feels, in that context, so wildly irresponsible to depict, for shock value, gun-related violence at a school that is resolved in part by incredibly dangerous heroics. See also: The police are almost immediately onsite (the teenagers of today's Archie comics have cell phones, after all), but they don't bust in because...well, either because plot, or because Uvalde hadn't happened yet and so people weren't thinking about the scope of destruction when police are actually needed but sit on their asses instead. (Although seriously—this was a lesson we learned with Columbine, no? Almost twenty years before this volume was published? And at least with Columbine they had the excuse of following what was at the time protocol.)

I don't know. I guess it feels as though all of the plotlines that have been building throughout the series (Betty and Archie! Veronica and Archie! Betty's injury! Reggie's delinquency! Dilton's crush!) are shoved aside to make way for an ill-thought-out school shooting plotline, and I'm not so much here for that. Bringing in the guns and yet going out with a whimper rather than a bang...