A review by jwmcoaching
Kevin Keller: Welcome to Riverdale by Dan Parent

1.0

I have some serious issues with this. The depiction of high school life here is your typical Riverdale atmosphere: dating, school, the prom, the beach...a random trip to England, etc. However, against this backdrop is the life of Kevin Keller, the newest resident of Riverdale, who honestly could be any handsome teen in this town except for the fact that he’s gay, which is his only distinctive quality. Yes, he’s nice, and yes, he’s an army brat, but other than that I felt like he could just be the archetype for any of the handsome, male teens here. He seemed extremely interchangeable except for the fact of his homosexuality. The portrayal of behaviors is also pretty simplistic. Essentially, the idea is that everyone likes Kevin, even though he’s gay (“They like me because I’m Kevin, they don’t care I’m gay.”) and the one person who is mean to him is an evil caricature with no real nuance or depth. He’s extremely one-dimensional. Even the surf contest seems more about Kevin’s sexuality than anything else. In short, it’s a good thing to be accepting and a bad thing to be a bigot. As with every Archie comic, women are portrayed as being eye candy who vie for the men (Betty vs. Veronica) or are obsessed with fashion and are vain and/or will do anything to get a man’s attention. The men, especially Kevin, are very much the focus here. The depiction of homosexuality seems incredibly outdated and quaint even though this text is only about 10 years old. I would hope that if the Kevin Keller character is still around that things have progressed far beyond this. Veronica is depicted here as the cliché friend who carries a torch for Kevin and seems to think that he will change his mind about women. The whole thing just seems incredibly old-fashioned. The ideology behind this felt like something from the 1980s or the 1990s. I felt like homosexuality was treated at best like a novelty here.