At first flush, it’s a creative choice, but there’s a marketing decision behind it. The kind of marketing decision that keeps people up at night. The six-cups-of-coffee a day marketing decision. The double-check your exit strategy marketing decision.

Putting a gay man in Archie comics.

It’s not exactly groundbreaking — both Marvel and DC have gay characters of long standing in their mainstream books, albeit some with pretty clumsy introductions and poor follow-through. But Archie is significantly different.

Super-hero comics do, after all, push the envelope. Not always, and not often, but there’s at least an ongoing token attempt to keep the spandex set in tune with the world around them; be it through storylines tackling drug addiction, child abuse, and so on. Super-heroes, after all, right wrongs, and social justice makes for a fairly obvious intersection.

Archie, on the other hand, is safe. It’s hard to think of safer IP, in terms of fictional worlds, than Riverdale; especially “living” worlds, fictional spaces that remain popular after decades and continue producing new material.

The clothes get updated, and there’s the occasional mention of hip-hop, but Archie remains locked in the ’50s: mostly white small-town America, where teens double-date over sodas at the Chok’lit Shoppe. Archie is the comic in the supermarket checkout line. It’s a security blanket.

And now, Archie Comics is getting its first openly gay male character.

It’s a risky move.

The right move often is.

I would argue that the Archie demographic is substantially different than the super-hero comic demographic. Super-hero books are, after all, sold at specialty shops mostly to men in their mid-twenties. Archie’s books are mainly checkout-counter fare, with a readership (according to an older interview) pre-teen girls. Who are — one hopes — more accepting and open than perhaps an older generation might be.

When one looks at where the pre-teen girls get their money to buy the Archie comics, though, one begins to realize how this is a gutsy move for the company. Archie, after all, was also the property that featured in a series of evangelical Christian comics in the ’70s. It’s “safe” material for less-tolerant people, something they can buy their kids (or let their kids buy) without thinking twice about it.

So there’s courage to be found here: Archie stands to lose a chunk of money from the bastion of old-school, less open readers who will either drop a decades-old habit or tighten their purse strings when their kids ask them for comics money. From a straight finance point of view, any sales loss from the conservative side of the fence would have to be met by increased sales from the BGLT-friendly side of the fence.

Either that, or this is triage: trying to keep the comic “current” to fight off a sales drop due to the comic’s lack of contemperanity. But looking at sales figures for Archie in 2008, and then looking at similar figures for 2009, we can see numbers consistently trending up. Archie books don’t sell in the numbers of the main mainstream super-hero books, but they’re still doing fine, and even crawling upwards in sales.

If this isn’t due to immediate sales pressures, then, it’s an editorial and marketing choice.

Which brings us back to this being a gutsy choice.

The person behind this particular story, Dan Parent, has some interesting lines in the press release:

“It’s not an issue like it would have been 20-30 years ago,” Parent explained. “We’re not trying to send social messages. We just want to reflect what’s going on today. Riverdale’s a melting pot.”

He added that people who are offended by seeing the Riverdale kids befriend a gay teen “aren’t the kind of people we want reading our comics anyway.”

It’s a bold stance (and one that may not be shared, verbatim, by those running the publishing company).

What’s the gain/loss here?

Publicity: Definite gain. For good or bad, this has people talking. Some positive reactions, some negative, but the talk is there. Moreso than it has been in a while, Archie’s in the news: and this after a string of promotional ideas including manga, a “modern look” art style, and more.

Sales: Probably, overall, a loss. Given the year-over-year numbers, again, this doesn’t look like triage. Some more conservative circles will write Archie off because of this, which means there has to be a counterbalancing mass of gay-positive sales to make up for the gay-negative drop. Likely? Well… not impossible, but it doesn’t seem probable that, beyond a single-issue sales boost, this will convert into long-term bigger numbers from one camp to compensate from losses from the other.

Relevance: Huge gain — not even up for discussion, really. Gay people are now, thankfully, out of the closet and (largely) free to live without being persecuted; a huge part of the landscape. Avoiding the issue is surreal.

But when has Archie benefited from being real? Its success is arguably predicated on its innocence; its being out of step with the times in its own way. Other attempts to make it “relevant” have always been quietly shuffled off, or at least the most dramatic ones. Case in point: Chuck, “the black guy,” who was added to the cast decades ago to be, well, “the black guy,” and quietly turned into an invisible and characterless background character for pretty much the duration.

So will Kevin be Chuck II, the quiet unobtrusive gay guy who is seen in crowd scenes and on occasion gives Veronica a fashion tip? Or will he be a fully-fledged, active cast member with a wide range of interests and activities that aren’t raging stereotypes?

Make no mistake, either way, this is how progress is made. Ideally, Kevin will become a near-central cast member on the Dilton/Midge/Mooose kind of orbit — present enough to be noticeable, and hopefully with character traits other than “gay.” But even if this winds up more stereotypical than the ideal, it’s still forward motion, and to be commended.

We’ll see what the sales figures say.