Just yesterday, I was reminiscing about Archie comics — a subject that does not come up often at the office, or indeed, in my experience, anywhere else. I was saying how funny I thought they were, when I was a kid back in the Seventies, and how they were old-fashioned even for their time. (My enjoyment of them was far from a majority taste.) Lo and behold, Archie comics are in the national headlines this morning, as the series has announced the introduction of its first openly gay character. I had no idea they ever engaged in updates of this kind; I pictured Riverdale as an eternally unchanging backdrop, like the setting of some newspaper comic strips. I probably even thought they were running the same jokes (which, I would insist, are as funny now as they were in 1973). (NB. Archie was created by John Goldwater, who was, according to Wikipedia, distantly related to the late Arizona senator.)