Don’t tell anyone but I used to read Archie comics. I was probably eleven or twelve when my parents picked up a digest for family road trip reading and it just kind of became tradition for a few years. As my brother and I progressed through our teens, the old Archie digests became fertile ground for the lowbrow defacement teenage boys tend to find hilarious. I grew out of the comic but I still remember some of it.
A particular detail remains that, in a way, I still find startling. The character of Dilton Doiley filled the stereotypical role of genius science nerd in the Archie “gang” and perpetually embodied everything that profile includes. He was a short kid with glasses who yearned to be good at sports but usually fell behind in gym class. He was awkward with girls and often screwed up by over-sciencing everything as per his nerdy style. Dilton’s role was essentially to be threatened by tough guys, ignored by women and subtly pitied by his friends while hiding in his garage as he churned out endless wacky inventions.
Dilton formed an equally stereotypical brains/brawn duo with his best friend and town idiot Moose Mason. He frequently envied Moose’s physicality and relied on him several times as a meat shield against bullies. In return, Moose reaped access to Dilton’s vast knowledge of all tings scienc-ey.
But Dilton didn’t really need Moose. What always struck me was that he could create ridiculously advanced technology – robotics, time travel, swapping minds with his dog – but couldn’t simply build himself to be more powerful. Through all the crazy stuff he achieved, where was the cybernetic body or the genetic manipulation that would have given him the strength of ten Mooses all on his own?
You can make the argument that Dilton’s character had to stay small and bullied because it supported plot lines and gave the gang balance. You could also presume that Dilton chose to remain in his predicament because he decided it was more important to “be himself” or some similar squeaky clean crap. He could have been afraid that his friendship with Moose would be threatened if he suddenly no longer needed a benevolent bodyguard. Or he might have reasoned that the girls who chose to like him for his brainy qualities were the girls he appreciated the most anyway.
No shoehorned justification for the character trope holds any water however. A slightly more entertaining Dilton would have given himself bionic eyes, a powered exoskeleton body (with platform boots for extra compensation) and a built-in jetpack so he could sky write “Screw You Losers” over Riverdale. Then he would have headed to the beach looking for “chicks who like ’em tall”. It might read something like this:
Super Dilton built himself artificial confidence. After years of being down on himself for smallness, he went hog wild with the teen identity equivalent of a thousand pickup truck scrotums. I can actually picture the expression of terrorized awe on Reggie’s face as the shadow of Super Dilton fell over him for one mega payback slap-down behind the bleachers at Riverdale High.
Archie confronted him, saying something like ‘What happened to the old Dilton we all loved the way he was?’
Super Dilton predictably shot back ‘You only loved him because he couldn’t threaten your ego!’ Finally, Archie wound up getting the Reggie treatment and his cartoon drawn face received a lot of cartoon drawn broken bones.
Moose, the old pal, was next on the menu. Playing the obligatory meathead role, he put himself in front of Super Dilton in an irony cliche of protecting the community from the buddy he used to protect from them.
‘D’uh, you’re a jerk’, Moose drawled. Then Super Dilton projected years’ worth of pent up shame onto Moose, resenting him with childish scorn. Moose waited for the end of the tirade and responded ‘D’uh, ok jerk. Put up your dukes!’
Super Dilton put up his dukes, alright; he put them up into Moose’s brain pan.
The gang stood in shock over the pool of starkly vibrant fluids trickling from the large boy’s skull, opened up like the petals of a flower. Fragments of sticky bone and clods of blonde hair spread in an explosive pattern over the sidewalk as Moose’s body jerked in spasms of false life. Midge, his girlfriend, stared speechless with gobbets of his still-warm brain matter oozing off her clothing and skin.
(This first actual killing would mark a melodramatic pivot in Super Dilton’s development. With bludgeoning simplicity, the story would veer into juvenile angst over the course of some “going into hiding” sequence. There would probably be some crying alone somewhere.)
Remembering the long ago words of, I don’t know, Professor Flutesnoot, Super Dilton eventually steeled himself against self loathing and despair to make a comeback with the abilities he had all along or something. He focused his intelligence into a hyper-determined mission to show everyone that he wasn’t a murdering prick, he was instead better than ever!
Returning to show his face in the streets, Super Dilton met with screams of revulsion and a town of agoraphobic teens oppressed by anxiety and riddled with PTSD. He was shot at a couple of times but his highly advanced armour weave casing left him unscathed.
Entering Pop Tate’s Chocklit Shoppe, Super Dilton found a shivering, pallid-skinned Jughead stress eating so constantly that he never even stopped to sleep.
‘Oh fuck! Ohhhh fuck!! Ohh FU-‘ Jughead stammered in a quivering whine and then vomited uncontrollably over the floor, mid-exclamation, from insensible horror. Delirious from sleep deprivation and the bodily strain of a painfully distended stomach, Jughead suffered cardiac arrest and died sprawled in his own puke, calling blindly for his absent friend Arch.
Discouraged but undeterred, Super Dilton went back to the only place he ever felt true solace, his precious garage/lab. He found it locked down by the police. Prejudice over the “Moose incident” was runing high and there was almost no chance to resolve the standoff but Super Dilton persevered. Once again hearing the Professor’s inspiring words in his hormonally tempestuous head, he applied his 198 IQ and negotiated entry with the authorities.
Safely inside the garage, surrounded by all his doodads and contraptions, Super Dilton at last experienced the first moment of peace he’d felt in weeks.
Then word came over the radio to the nervous police outside that there was another dead child at Pop Tate’s. Cursing themselves for giving this hellion any quarter, the officers fired a barrage of tear gas into the garage. A cascade of canisters hurled in on Super Dilton from all sides. His artificial eyes were immune to the clawing sting but he choked on the suffocating smoke. He fired his jetpack in desperation and barreled from the garage through the nearest window. The sound of snapping bones crackled in Super Dilton’s ears as his mass cannoned through the bodies of at least two officers. It sounded like a handful of celery mashed against a plate of tomatoes.
In order to preserve what remained of his contorting psyche, Super Dilton blocked out the torturous feelings of guilt as he careened through the sky on an aimless trajectory. Thrusting ever faster against the pummelling headwind, the piercing emotional ache slid away from his mind the way the streaking blood and offal slid from his mechanized body.
Super Dilton deadened himself to the lives and deaths of his former fellow citizens. He tried to remember every time he’d ever been cut off in the grocery line. It was clear that there was no place for him anywhere these panicky animals drew breath. He flew nonstop for hours until he was far from civilization.
When he was completely on his own deep in the mountains, Super Dilton boiled in his own thoughts. His intense discordance with other human beings distilled into an unspeakable bitterness mixed with a crashing loneliness. He missed them just as much as he hated them. The terrible dichotomy might drive him to insanity if he couldn’t find some way to deal with it. Perhaps he was already insane. He heard the words of Professor Flutesnoot one more time, but now it became the gurgling bark of Jughead’s technicolor yawn, haunting him from back at the Chocklit Shoppe, echoing endlessly.
Super Dilton seized upon the first crazed idea that sprang to his attention offering salvation against the agony. With a combination of wood from the hastily torn down trees around him and cannibalized components of his own hulking form, he constructed a companion. The breasts were mismatched and the face a blank plate of metal but she was beautiful to his crumbling heart. What remained of him fumbled in anticipation as he activated She-Dilton.
The culmination of Super Dilton’s maddening pain was nothing less than the creation of actual life. Such was his towering genius that even this improvised being was possessed of genuine consciousness and living emotion as it became animated in its first moment of sentience.
She-Dilton’s birth was a thing of soul-carving dismay. The sound it instantly emitted as its awareness flared into existence could only be that of absolute suffering. Super Dilton hobbled backward from the howling abomination of life with the plummeting realization that he had crafted hell on earth. Right in front of its creator and would-be partner, She-Dilton engineered its own abortion. Its spindly limbs scrabbled for anything it could tear out until its frantic self destruction rent it into a pile of leaking hydraulics and splintered wood.
Only one hope of reversing Super Dilton’s waking nightmare remained: the time machine shit in his garage. If he returned there once again, even for a minute, he could access its capabilities and cut the thread of this monstrous distortion of power before it even wove its way into the fabric of spacetime. He could go back to being pipsqueak Dilton and be surrounded by the love of all his friends.
With paralyzing alarm, Super Dilton remembered that the jetpack parts had gone into making She-Dilton. Those parts were now strewn across the chilly clearing he slowly sank to his knees in. Too much of himself was dismantled beyond repair. He would never survive the journey back to Riverdale on foot.
Super Dilton’s internal nutrient supply was able to keep him running for days but he needed to die much sooner. He lashed together several logs and created a vice in which to place his neck. He feverishly looked forward to following Moose, Jughead and poor She-Dilton soon. With the release of a trigger-branch, Super Dilton’s windpipe and spine were crushed, so tightly that his head was almost ground right off.
Despite having to live short and nerdy his whole life, Dilton’s character always had the advantage of intelligence. With such intelligence, he could fill in any other gaps and make up for any shortcoming. He was certainly able to build a good reliable suicide machine. Then his broken body farted but no one was around to hear it.
Anyway, the Archie comics are still in my parents’ basement somewhere collecting dust. I’m sure they’re not as engaging as when you’re a kid. Now I drive my own road trips and have settled into my own reading material.
I still think Dilton could have played his hand a lot better though.
There's No Going Back 