Archie comics’ lonely hearts advice, as reissued in Quebec
This article examines the love advice issued in the Betty et Veronica and Archie series translated into French and adapted by Les Éditions Héritage during the 1980s, in order to develop a profile of the readership, on the one hand, and a discourse on love and dating, on the other. A section in the series’ issues entitled “Chères Betty et Veronica,” borrowing the names of the serial heroines, was published alongside the “Courrier de Dominique” section in which Dominique Payette, an employee at Héritage, answers the intimate questions of the readership at great length. While dating was found to be a favourite theme of the public, especially in “Courrier de Dominique,” an analysis of 325 letters from both sections reveals that love, as such, was nevertheless stripped of all roughness. In various ways, the columnists sublimate love in favour of friendship, encouraging the young readership to postpone the search for true love by offering them a dreamlike representation of adolescence, which is not foreign to the world of the “eternal adolescent” Archie.