Dear Dr. Boli: I read somewhere, maybe in a magazine or a blog or on the back of a cereal box, that all the stories in the world use basically the same small set of character types, just giving them different details and stuff. Is that true? —Sincerely, J. K. Rowling, Fortress of Impenetrable Smugness, Edinburgh or Possibly Kensington.

Dear Madam: Yes, it is true that, among the stories that have circulated in every culture since time immemorial, and possibly even before that, anthropologists and cultural historians have identified a small number of recurring character types, which they designate the Light Masculine, Light Feminine, Dark Masculine, and Dark Feminine. Because the characters are supposedly demonstrated in an exceptionally pure form in a certain mid-twentieth-century comic-book series (with which Dr. Boli regrets to say he is not as familiar as he ought to be), these characters are known in academic literary criticism as the Archie Types.