Archie gets experimental
Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, the X-Men, Dark X-Men, The Order, Heroes For Hire, Oracle Inc, Deep Six, Tthe Cabal and even the Illuminati!
His alliances are also not confined to just the good guys – he has also teamed up with villains such as Doctor Doom and Magneto in the past, and his last dalliance with Cyclops’ Uncanny X-Men team in the Avengers Vs X-Men event saw him becoming one of the Phoenix Five, and leading Atlantis to war against Black Panther’s homeland of Wakanda!
Forbidden love
of winning her heart is probably why someone of his charisma and stature has remained love-less all these years.
He may have moved on from Sue already, but the recent NamorEmma-Cyclops love triangle did leave a bad taste in my mouth!
Movie-less King
THERE was a time when Archie Comics was famous for being rigidly conservative. Now it’s gaining a reputation for being the most experimental comics publisher in America.
Most of the company’s progressive efforts aren’t obvious to the casual observer. It has aggressively entered the digital comics market, for example, with its own app and other innovations. It’s quietly pursuing projects for its library of characters in television and movies, which won’t be obvious until they come to fruition.
Other efforts have already made a splash. For example, Archie Comics made national headlines in 2009 exploring what would happen if Riverdale’s favourite redhead married (alternatively, in back-to-back stories) either Veronica and Betty ( Archie issues #600#607). Written by movie producer Michael Uslan, the stories were so popular that both are being continued in Life With Archie, a magazine-format series created just for that purpose. Those stories are written and drawn by veterans of serious superhero books, so that Life With Archie is a good read for adults as well as Archie’s traditional market.
Another headline-buster was the advent in 2010 of Kevin Keller, Riverdale’s first openly gay character. Despite threats by some venues to stop selling Archie Comics, the publisher forged ahead. Eventually the furore died down and Keller is now one of the most popular members of the Archie gang – and the star of his own solo book.
And just this month Archie Comics released a trade paperback collecting a courageous story that somehow went under the radar in 2010. Archie & Friends
reprints an interracial romance between Archie and Valerie, the African-American guitarist in Josie & The Pussycats.
At the time the Archie-Valerie romance was presented as part of Archie’s ongoing story, but with the romance unable to continue because the high schoolers lived in different towns. A 2012 sequel – which I hope to see collected soon – explored the idea of Archie and Valerie getting married, like the abovementioned Life With Archie stories.
That, obviously, was a “what if”, so whether Archie and Valerie are still an on-and-off-again couple in “real” Riverdale is questionable.
Come to think of it, perhaps the lack of attention the Archie-Valerie romance stirred up is a good sign. In the early days of comics, publishers were urged by Southern distributors to keep African-Americans off the covers. Even as late as 1966, when Marvel Comics introduced the Black Panther, creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby decided to give the character a full face mask so his ethnicity wasn’t immediately obvious.
Contrast that to today, when America’s most famous white teenager can smooch it up with a black girl on the cover of Archie. To tell you the truth, the interracial aspect of it didn’t even occur to me at the time – instead, I was wondering just what this Archie kid has got going that Betty, Veronica AND Valerie all find him irresistible. Lucky, lucky kid, that Archie.
I should warn that The Archies & Josie and the Pussycats – the title on the cover of the trade paperback – is written and drawn in traditional Archie style, meaning some adults may find it too simplistic. Still, it’s by Archie veterans Dan Parent and Bill Galvan, which means it’s pretty entertaining.
So what else could Archie Comics do with their characters that would shock us? Well, how about kill them?
Not all at once of course. Instead, we’re watching the gang struggle to survive in that suddenly popular genre, the zombie apocalypse!
Afterlife With Archie – you have to give points for the pun – launched several months ago with the most shocking Archie storyline I’ve ever read (or imagined). In the first issue, Jughead’s canine buddy Hot Dog is run over by a car. Desperate to bring his pal back to life, Juggie turns to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, who does her best to restore Hot Dog ... with horrible results.
That’s right, Hot Dog returns as a zombie. And promptly bites Jughead. And all zombie fans know what comes next.
By issue #4, Jughead had half-eaten another major character and infected half the town – including some longrunning characters. Archie and the remaining regulars took refuge in Lodge Mansion, with its many high-tech defences. But the infection had already found its way inside ...
Creeped out yet? Good! Because this is a horror title, and you’re supposed to be creeped out. And being creeped out can be fun, even if the people being threatened in the horror story are characters you’ve been invested in for many years. And, once again, Archie Comics has turned to superhero veterans to craft a story attractive to adult readers – in this case, writer Roberto AguirreSacasa ( Fantastic Four) and Eisnerwinning artist Francesco Francavilla ( Batman).
And just to sweeten the pot, reprinted in the back of some issues of Afterlife With Archie are short stories from the company’s last stab at horror books, Chilling Adventures In Sorcery (1972-75). That means the welcome return of suspense masterpieces by the likes of Gray Morrow and Dick Giordano.
Archie is even trying its hand at superheroes again, despite numerous failed efforts in the past. But The Fox, by superstar writer Mark Waid ( Daredevil, Indestructible Hulk) and unorthodox artist Dean Haspiel, is really quite a treat.
All this from a company that for many years almost singlehandedly kept alive the much-loathed Comics Code of America, which for decades reduced all American comics to an almost pre-school level. In those days, Archie Comics was synonymous with static lack of change.
But today? When you invoke the old cartoon theme song Everything’s Archie, it will bring a smile or two. From romance to superhero to horror, everything really is Archie – and it’s darn good. – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services