Addendum.
The comics may seem corny to me now, yes, but I did get at least one valuable lesson from Archie.
A little background first: You'd think that, after thousands of stories spanning almost sixty years, the writers would eventually run out of plots for the comics.
Well, in a way, they do. Usually the changing times fuel quite a few plots (you couldn't write a story about Archie and the Internet back in 1957, for example), and lately they've created a few new characters (Sassy Thrasher, to name one), but every now and then the writers just get stumped. What happens then?
It turns out that they have a technique for when that happens. When a writer can't think up a story, he simply takes any two characters who don't normally hang out with each other - say, Veronica and Jughead - and puts them together. The unlikely association invariably churns up something from the depths of the imagination.
Admit it - the notion of Veronica and Jughead being involved in the same story is a curious idea. What would each of them have to do with the other? How does each of them react to the situation? How and why does Archie show up in the episode, if he ever does in the first place?
Questions that inspire answers that inspire questions that inspire answers.
Imagination has an odd habit of tying any two things together, I suppose. What results is usually some sort of creative plot handling. You can have a finite number of concepts, yes, but if you start working with combinations of those concepts, then the number of possibilities become well-nigh infinite.
Very, very nice method.
Very, very nice.
1 comment:
Gasp! Archie comics as character-driven stories? I would never have thought it, but I think you hint at such.
Over the years, the characters have been fleshed out to such an extent that you already know their personalities and motivations. This, I think, gives them that timeless quality.
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