Mr. and Mrs. Archie Andrews?

So the word on the street is that Archie is getting married.

Archie Andrews is about to make an offer someone can’t refuse. In what Archie Comics is billing as the “Archie Story of the Century,” Hollywood producer and comics writer Michael Uslan (“The Dark Knight,” “The Spirit”) is set to take Riverdale’s resident redhead into the future where he pops the question more than 65 years in making: “Will you marry me?”

Well, he’s not actually getting married, of course, because he’s a cartoon character and is not able to actually get married or sign contracts or purchase stocks and bonds. But even in the world of Archie Comics, he’s not really getting married.

This is a story that starts about five years in the future. And it takes place just as Archie and the Gang graduate from college. So what we do here is take a leap into the future and the device that I use here is similar to what happened back in “Archie Digest” #236. There was a story where Archie meets Archie. Archie walks down memory lane and meets Archie from 1941. This time, he goes up the street rather than down the street and winds up walking smack into his own future.

And it is just, to me, a really, really cool setup where we get to explore what impact, making a decision about who you are going to marry has.

In other words, it’s a publicity stunt, just like Spider-Man getting un-married, just like the new Batman, just like the death of Superman, just like, frankly, “Final Crisis.” It’s there to grab a few extra readers for a month or two, and then it’ll never be mentioned in-continuity again.

I don’t mind a few publicity stunts now and then. I just wish the comics industry was better at designing and publishing them.

Besides, everyone knows Archie would marry Betty. Right?

Everyone knows that.