Riverdale Book Review

Super Graphic—A Visual guide to the Comic Book Universe is a collection of ingenious charts and graphs by Tim Leong which lay out facts about various graphic-adventure worlds in a way

I’m curious about where Leong got his data for some of these charts, but am more curious about why Archie Comics is so underrepresented. True, Archie characters have always stood out for their aberrant normalcy and nonsuperheroic powers. But there is over 70 years of history there that can organized in numerous fascinating ways. Leong devotes only chart exclusively to Archie interests, and chooses a dubious theme: “Archie’s Ample, Awesome, and Awful Alliteration.” The concept, apparently, is that a statistically significant number of characters in Riverdale have alliterative names: Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Dilton Doiley, Waldo Weatherbee, Moose Mason… Yet as the chart shows, many other Archie characters, major and minor, do not suffer from the same alliterative affliction: Reggie Mantle, Veronica Lodge, Midge Klump…
When I start to think of other comic companies, Archie seems positively diverse, namewise. In Metropolis alone, there’s Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Kitty Kowalski. Lucy Lane, Lori Lemaris, Mister Majestic, Mr. Mxyzptlk and Streaky the Supercat.