Go, girlfriend! Get her good!

When I bought this giant collection of Archie digests I was in a nostalgic haze. The comics that I was used to were circa 1940's-1980's. When you go beyond that point the quality goes down in strange and entertaining ways.
The Betty and Veronica Double Digest #52 was printed in 1995. I didn't have to get beyond the first story before the adventure began.

 
The Archie comics "artists" have their own special brand of perspective. Here we see the giantess Veronica, as tall as a house who is approaching Betty, who seems to be standing in a waist-deep hole and eating a brick wall. Seems like the rich princess has booked herself and her best "friend" on a thinly veiled Rikki Lake reference.
 
"I love 'The Nikki Pond show'! Her show is so fresh!" Usually to get this level of social-disconnect in writing, the author would have to be over 50. This Author at the time was 31 years old. This fact tells me that he is a nerd that lives in an all-white neighborhood in Connecticut, whose only connection to black people is MTV.

The character of Nikki Pond floats above the crowd in the fourth panel and after landing onstage she talks to two doll versions of Betty and Veronica. Her prop-makers are on the job I guess.

What? You mean Veronica has done something nasty to her best "friend"? My question would be this; Why is Veronica Lodge going to Public School with the Proletariat in the first place?
Betty's reaction? "Well, of all the nerve!".,.
Seriously, has that line been spoken (much less written in a script) since 1950?
If you look at the fifth panel you will see that the show is being taped in a ballroom and the crowd screams typical talk-show crowd-talk:
"Go, girlfriend! Get her good!"
"Catfight! Catfight!"
I'm sorry, but these words would only ever be spoken by a 31 year-old Connecticut douchebag while watching two black hookers wrestle.

Keep in mind that this was all written in 1995, when the target audience for Archie Comics were able to watch things like Batman or Tiny Toons on the local Fox affiliate.

Veronica forgets that she is wealthy for some reason, and believes that she must receive her "15 minutes" of fame in order to feel fulfilled by society. She is so upset that she puts her father's vast fortune at stake by assaulting a public figure in tape and in front of a live audience. She is also so angry that she manages to reduce herself to the size of a house cat during the attack.
 
Meanwhile, Vonqueesha and Nevaeh get into the act. This is actually a more realistic view of talk-shows of the day... until Veronica (the Rich bitch) for some reason starts talking to (gasp) black people and suffers the wrath of Geraldo.

Geraldo Rivera's nose was broken by a thrown chair during the taping of his talk-show in 1988. Was this (in 1995) supposed to be common knowledge to a 12 year-old comic-book reader?

Archie comics has been many things to me, but now it is something I never expected. Archie comics is a record of American trash culture, taking over the mainstream.