167 – Benjiclone

Wow, Archie Comics really spiffed up its website. (For the tiny fringe population who has never been to the Archie Comics website, it used to look like some circa-1998 Geocities page) Also, it looks like a recent issue of Veronica has her saluting the President on the cover and pledging to help with his job creation efforts. Between that and the introduction of the Archieverse’s first gay character in that title, it makes me curious if the Veronica audience skews especially liberal for some reason. That’s kind of counterintuitive (although, I like Veronica best, so there’s one anecdotal data point!). The Lodges are billionaires, but given the occasional stories where Mr. Lodge does things like decide to turn the wetlands he was going to build a mall on into a wildlife refuge instead, maybe he’s more of the socially conscious Warren Buffett type? This interpretation would make Veronica the urban, coastal yin to Betty’s midwest, red-state, occasional-Al Hartley-mouthpiece yang. And whoever the Archie universe’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh is, he’d be perpetually railing against “the Hiram Lodge-funded media”.

I’m pretty sure the Cabots vote straight Republican, though.