Archie Comics gambles on a hipster makeover
If it weren’t for the flaming red hair and toothy grin, you might not recognize the new Archie Andrews.
The 75-year-old comic book character has undergone a major makeover and his new hipster look debuted this week at the annual Comic-Con in San Diego.
Archie Comics is launching a new line of comics featuring a modernized Archie after it experimented for six years on how to bring the iconic character into the 21st century.
“It was clear to me that Archie was moving down the path of irrelevancy,” says Jon Goldwater, chief executive officer of Archie Comics and son of the man who created the first Archie in 1941. “I really wanted to aim for the comic book shops and the real comic book reader and do a complete relaunch of Archie.”
When he took over the company in 2009, Goldwater said, the brand was emblazoned in readers’ minds as a nostalgic stereotype. Meanwhile, a wave of indie titles was sweeping into comic book stores. One of the most successful in the new breed has been Saga, a science-fiction fantasy series illustrated by Calgary-based artist Fiona Staples. Archie Comics tapped Staples for its Archie redesign.
“Fiona was our first choice,” Goldwater says. “If she said yes, there was going to be no conversations with anybody else. We were so lucky she said yes.”
With his chiselled jawbone, skinny jeans and Justin Bieber haircut, the new, hipster Archie is a far cry from the bucktoothed bumpkin of earlier days. The rest of his pals at Riverdale High have also been transformed.
In her low-slung, ripped jeans, Betty is a thoroughly modern teenager; unlike her slightly two-dimensional 1950s incarnation, she is endowed with a full range of facial expressions. Archie’s best friend, Jughead, still wears a crown, but in every other respect he looks more like a stoner than a jester. In a slow-reveal strategy, the publisher has left Veronica out of the first comic in the new series.
To create the new Archie, Staples teamed up with writer Mark Waid, known for his work on such titles as Superman and Daredevil for DC and Marvel Comics. Riverdale High, as reimagined by Staples and Waid, seems a fairly good mirror of a public high school in a middle-income neighbourhood. The student body is ethnically diverse, one character is handicapped and almost everyone is glued to smartphones.
It’s a big gamble for the 30-person publisher, which relies on its namesake comic as a major source of revenue.