Archie Andrews, the freckled star of the Archie Comics series, is set to die a “heroic” death soon, as its publishers and creative team announced last week. The comic series, which is based in the fictional town of Riverdale and features Archie, and his friends — Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge and Jughead Jones, first appeared in 1941 and has remained hugely popular over decades. As readers await the final edition of the comic, Indian authors and graphic novelists came up with rather interesting takes on what it entails to kill off a character in a book.

Smart ploy?
Anuja Chauhan, author of The Zoya Factor and Those Pricey Thakur Girls, opines that in this case, it is just an attention-seeking ploy. “This move is aimed at milking the comic dry. The publishers probably wanted to stop publishing it and wanted readers to buy the last episode.” That said, she admits that it can be traumatic for a writer to kill off a character in a comic/novel.