Nerding Day: Date With Debbi

I’m pretty sure that Archie Andrews sold his soul to the devil. Not in one of the gritty Archie comics like Afterlife With Archie, and not like the cute 1960s comic where Betty and Veronica sold their souls to the devil and then chased him back to hell. Which was real, by the way:

I’m talking about Archie selling his soul in a very tangible way that allowed him to thrive while the many Archie knockoffs fell at his gangly teen feet. Dead Archie knockoffs litter the bins of comic book stores as plentiful as autumn leaves, and I love to come across one to see how much it stole from Archie and why I think it failed. Last week, I found DC's Date With Debbi. A comic that looks like its premise is trans Archie is fucking Reggie and they're very happy together!

I picked up cursed issue number 13 of Date With Debbi. Here's what I learned; Debbi is a murderer. Debbi harms so many men she would be the most effective member of The Justice League if they could get her to join. They couldn't get her to join The Justice League, though; because Debbi doesn't give a fuck about vigilantism. Debbi has one goal in life, it's to get dicked down, and we all respect that. Sorry, now that I'm thinking about it, she might join The Justice League, but only if she got a look at the can on Nightwing.

In Archie comics, the punchline is always, "This teen is horny," and Debbi keeps that same basic framework. The only tweak it makes is that it allows a girl to drive boys as crazy as Archie does to the ladies. Debbi is getting these men hit with rocks. Even random salesmen fear Debbi's wrath. She once threw a book at her boyfriend Buddy, missed and hit a door-to-door salesman, then stepped right over him on her quest to find another date like a goddamn kaiju hopping over a diner to go smash the empire state building.

All hail Debbi, destroyer of men, obviously. It's not like Debbi lives in a safe world, either. Unlike Riverdale Prime, Debbi lives in a prison town, which I know because in one story, a man named Shotgun Burt is loose in her neighborhood after escaping. I can't say for sure what Shotgun Burt's crimes were, but I'm going to guess he wasn't jaywalking. In the story, all of the boys in the neighborhood flock to Debbi's house to protect her, but they don't realize that Shotgun Burt's only hope of survival is to avoid dating Debbi.

I say that it's men specifically that Debbi trounces because she does have a romantic rival of sorts, and Debbi never really unleashes the kind of destruction on Mona that she does on the men she loves. The worst thing she does to Mona is refuse to share their mutual boyfriend with her. Mona will occasionally cook up a scheme to keep Debbi and Buddy apart, and those schemes are beyond the normal amount of crazy. In one, she pays their friend Benedict ten dollars to drive Buddy insane because Debbi would not want to date "a nut." That's the plot of a gothic novel, not a ridiculous teen sex romp.

Her plan to drive Buddy to madness by making him think a pet store parrot has escaped and gained sentience is thwarted by the fact that Debbi doesn't really give a shit. She will date a man who believes a sentient parrot speaks only to him because the standards for men were that low in the early '70s. That's why we all have an uncle with a secret parrot prophet. Also, Buddy figures out the scheme and tries to murder the parrot, but Benedict stops him so he doesn't lose his parrot rental deposit. Debbi stories are at once madness, yet also bulletproof in their story architecture and internal logic.

So that's what Mona's bringing to the table as far as schemes to date Buddy– insanity, murder, the usual teen stuff. The parrot story ends with Mona getting beaten up by a grown adult woman who thinks Mona is having an affair with her husband because of a mix-up at the hospital with another patient with the same last name as Buddy. Oh wait, did Debbi use her Debbi powers to get the universe to beat Mona up for her? My God, she's even more dangerous than I imagined. RIP Mona.

When she's not slaughtering her romantic rivals, Debbi does things like engage in psychological warfare with her romantic rivals. Once, she even convinced the lovely Helen Carwell that Buddy wouldn't want to take her out because he only likes robust females. This leads to Helen kicking Buddy's ass to show how very robust she is. Debbi cannot even gaze upon the destruction her powers have wrought.

One nice thing about Date With Debbi is that it doesn't just chronicle Debbi's many adventures, and her many victims. It offers fun quizzes and advice for teens who aren't able to destroy their friends and enemies as easily as Debbi. This advice is often brutal. It's your boomer grandpa telling you how disappointed he is in you, but in fun comic book form! Have you, child, ever really sat and considered why you aren't popular? Debbi has, and she thinks it's definitely your fault.

Dear loser children, Debbi has some notes. The quiz questions have two answers and the key to the quiz says, "If you answered less than ten Bs you know why you're not popular! Take yourself in hand, have the guts to change and be a groovy kid in your own right!" Here's a sample question that all thin-faced children are expected to answer with B. No word on what children with nice robust faces are supposed to do. What then, huh Debbi?

There's also a section where kids can write to Debbi so that she can insult them and their petty problems directly. Here's a great example of Debbi doing what she does best: destroying a fifteen-year-old boy. This boy writes in and says he is popular but can't seem to get a girlfriend. Debbi assures him that he is not actually popular. Don't worry; she's very rude about it.

Date with Debbi ended when DC canceled its entire humor line of comics in 1972. Wow, Debbi's powers of destruction were so strong they had to take down an entire imprint to finish her off. Still, Debbi clearly couldn't compete with Archie, even though the two of them look so much alike that if Archie's mom ever ran into Debbi at the grocery store his parents would probably get divorced.

DC's Date With Debbi was with a major comic book distributor, and it had a solid cast of characters stolen almost beat for beat from Archie. Debbi was basically Betty, Mona was Veronica, and Buddy was Archie. We were just experiencing their love triangle from the point of view of Betty, and this version of her had protagonist powers that allowed her to bring violence to her enemies. That should rule!

Maybe it was the soft attempt at teen magazine articles between the pages that made the comic flop so hard, but I think teens at the time had more experience with having their self-esteem torn apart by comic book characters. One of the creators of Date with Debbi also wrote Jonah Hex, a ghost-fighting cowboy with half his face melted off, so he probably wasn't the best person to assign the task of giving life advice to teens. He was speed-writing Debbi so he could get to his horny cowboy demon project. Batman probably also told all of the teen boys writing into his advice column that they suck, and he hates them, right?

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Ruiz, a fifteen-year-old boy writing into an Archie spinoff comic for dating advice.

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