Archie #602

October 24, 2009

Archie #602 (Archie Comics)
By Michael Uslan and Stan Goldberg

Archie and Veronica announce the impending birth of their child to a bevy of friends and family. Everyone’s got their own reaction, from soon-to-be godmother Betty to substitute lamaze partner Jughead, and when the little bundles of joy finally arrive, things couldn’t be better for Archie Andrews. Or could they? At the beginning of this story, Michael Uslan set up what appeared to be the big mama-jama reset button of all time. At the end of this issue, it turns out that it wasn’t a reset button, but a device that plays out here, in the middle of the story. I think Archie Comics may have jumped the gun on the publicity for this storyline, as we see here that the whole point of this was not to marry Archie off to Veronica, but to explore possible futures. I’m definitely interested to see what happens next, but I think that guy who sold off his Archie #1 out of protest may have acted a little too rashly.
Rating: 8/10

Archie 3000 #14

December 11, 2011

Title: Oh, Christmas Transporter, Oh Christmas Transporter and other stories

Writers: Dan Parent, Paul Castiglia, Bill Golliher
Pencils: Dan Parent, Bill Golliher
Inks: Jon D’Agostino, Pat Kennedy
Colorist: Barry Grossman
Letterer: Bill Yoshida
Cover Artist: Dan Parent
Editor: Scott Fulop
Publisher: Archie Comics

While Archie Comics, much to their credit, is doing some really interesting things with their comic books in the here and now, in the early 1990s they were trying a lot of fun things as well: new characters, new concepts, and new twists on their formula. None of them really stuck, but for people of my age who were reading Archie at the time, there’s a nostalgia factor here that makes me glad I can still find copies of stuff like Archie 3000 in the ether.

This issue of the title which re-cast Archie and company a millennia in the future is their Christmas special. Archie (the 3000 version) and the gang are knee-deep in Christmas shopping, which in the year 3000 seems to be done exclusively via the Home Shoppin’ Teleportation Network. (Boy, if they could have foreseen the Internet, huh?) Even Santa Claus uses teleportation these days, something which frustrates the parents of Riverdale, who evidently are old enough to remember the days when he delivered presents by hand. Whether this means that teleportation technology is still relatively recent in the year 3000 or that advances in medical technology have allowed the parents to live for hundreds of years is never really made clear. Anyway, when an atmospheric disturbance knocks out the whole planetwide teleportation network, both Archie and Santa Claus will have to do Christmas old-school. The book is fun, but like so many visions of the future, when you look back on it a few years down the line, it seems terribly, hysterically quaint.

Very few Archie Comics have just one story, though, so let’s look at the back-up features, non-Christmasy they may be. In “Squirm Assignment,” Archie and Dilton have a big sociology assignment due for school, and Archie makes do with a Dict-o-Text, a device that is intended to help focus one’s mind and structure a report, but runs the risk of just creating the entire presentation if you let your mind run away with it. I’m pretty sure you can guess where this is going. The story was funny, in a “Jetsons” kind of way, and led up to a good punchline.

And in “Teleportation Troubles,” Archie gets himself into classic trouble when he has dates with both Betty and Veronica at the same time. This being the year 3000, though, when travel is evidently much cheaper, the dates are actually on opposite sides of the continent. With a little help from Dilton, Archie tries to teleport back and forth between the two, with again, predictable results. Not a bad story, but pretty standard – you could do a contemporary Archie story with Dilton building a teleportation device and have the same effect, and it would be more impressive since we hadn’t read another story based entirely around teleportation eight pages earlier.

I do still have a fondness for this old series, though, and for the others of its era: Jughead’s Time Police, Archie’s R/C Racers, Faculty Funnies, Dilton’s Strange Science, Explorers of the Unknown… there were some gems there. It’s a shame that we don’t see their like anymore.

Rating: 7/10

Betty and Veronica (1987 Series) #231

November 17 2007

Betty and Veronica #231 (Archie Comics)
By George Gladir, Mike Pellowski, Kathleen Webb & Jeff Shultz

The Archie gang gives us a quartet of Christmas-themed stories this month, all with fine art by Jeff Shultz, with different writers passing the stories back and forth. George Gladir takes the lead with “The Shoppers,” in which the girls have finished their online Christmas shopping only to discover at the last minute that they’ve forgotten to get a present for Jughead’s sister, Jellybean. With no time left to log on, the girls risk life and limb at the mall. Mike Pellowski‘s “Santa Shortage” is a really cute story featuring the girls trying to find a last-minute replacement Santa Claus for a charity event, and wind up with more than they bargained for. Kathleen Webb‘s “Are You Sure?” is the only non-Christmas story in the book, and also the weakest. Veronica announces Betty that she and Archie have gotten married, sending Betty into a panic with a sort of cliched ending. Webb redeems herslef with “Pretty is as Pretty Does,” though in which Veronica tries to explain her overboard makeup style to her best friend, and lets a big secret slip to the readers. This is a nice issue, fun for people who like to overload on Christmas comics. Y’know, people like me.
Rating: 8/10

Archie #601

October 24, 2009

Archie #601 (Archie Comics)
By Michael Uslan & Stan Goldberg

The wedding of Archie and Veronica hits Riverdale by storm. The marriage of Riverdale’s most famous socialite brings in visitors, ties up traffic, and arrests all the activity in the small town — except for a heart-to-heart between Betty and Veronica. Uslan’s writing improves this issue. Although he already had a strong grasp on who the characters are, his dialogue is considerably better, except for a rather schmaltzy speech by Jughead at the wedding. Okay, it’s a wedding, so you expect some schmaltz, but this is enough that it feels out of character. Anyway, the focus on Archie and Veronica continues, but the side characters aren’t ignored either. Reggie gets a nice moment, and there’s a nice bit with the faculty of Riverdale High. The reset button set up last issue is still there, and Uslan deftly sidesteps any less than family friendly moments one would normally associate with a wedding storyline (the bachelor party, for instance), but the story is getting better.
Rating: 7/10

Veronica #207 (aka Kevin Keller #1)

September 4, 2011

Title: Meet Kevin Keller!

Writer: Dan Parent
Pencils: Dan Parent
Inks: Rich Koslowski
Colorist: Digikore Studios
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Cover Artist: Dan Parent
Editor: Victor Gorelick
Publisher: Archie Comics

Archie Comics made a big deal out of giving Kevin Keller his own “miniseries,” but that’s not technically the case. Rather, they’re giving him the spotlight for four issues of Veronica and doubling up the numbers. (Officially, this is Veronica #207, but it’s also labeled as Kevin Keller #1.) In this issue, two old friends of Kevin’s from his younger days come to Riverdale for a visit with the traveling army brat, just in time to help everyone get ready for the big Fourth of July parade and tell everybody how awesome Kevin is.

Honestly, that’s what happens in this book, and in so doing, it commits not one, but two cardinal sins. First, and most obvious, there’s no real story here. It’s basically just Kevin’s friends telling stories about him. There’s no conflict or struggle, save for a quick gag about Kevin and Jughead in a pie-eating contest and a short scene in which Kevin is worried how his father will react when he comes out to him. All of this could easily be fodder for good stories, but what little tension the writer manages to create always evaporates immediately.

This gets us to the second problem: Kevin himself. For a character that brought Archie Comics a wealth of media attention, he is mind-numbingly boring. Honestly, the stories his friends tell us amount to the following:

• When he was a kid, Kevin suffered from bad teeth and acne, problems that disappeared when he entered high school. Despite his newfound hunkiness, he didn’t ditch his old friends.
• He took a friend to a junior high dance to protect her from a jerk that tried to hurt her feelings.
• His parents love him, and always have, and always will.
• He’s going to join the military, and everybody is proud of that.

And it all adds up to a great big ball of, “so what?” I get what Dan Parent is trying to do with this character: he wants to make him a well-rounded character that escapes all of the traditional gay clichés and stereotypes. And that’s good. That’s even admirable. But he’s simply gone too far in the other direction. Kevin, as presented in this issue, is a character utterly without fault, and I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, male, female, black, white, or a cocker spaniel, it’s dull to read about somebody who’s perfect. Even in the squeaky-clean world of Riverdale, most of our characters have faults: Archie is a chronic screw-up and indecisive, Veronica is spoiled, Betty is a bit of a pushover, Jughead is a glutton, Reggie is a jerk… I could keep going here for a long time, because over the decades these characters have been introduced, the writers have found niches for them that include character faults that provide easy avenues for storytelling. Kevin has no such faults, resulting in a story bereft of conflict, which is a story that any first-year creative writing student will tell you isn’t actually a story.

I’m always in favor of expanding the cast of characters in Archie’s universe, and I think there’s a place for Kevin Keller, but the writers are going to have to work a lot harder to make him feel like a character instead of just a bone to throw to a certain portion of the audience.

Rating: 5/10

Betty #193

September 4, 2011

Title: Fantasy Flair and other stories

Writer: George Gladir, Mike Pellowski, Tom DeFalco, John Rose
Pencils: Pat Kennedy, Tim Kennedy
Inks: Mike DeCarlo
Colorist: Digikore Studios
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Cover Artist: Fernando Ruiz
Editor: Victor Gorelick
Publisher: Archie Comics

This issue of Betty brings us a whopping four all-new stories, which is pretty much the formula for some of them to suck. The first one, “Fantasy Flair,” is okay. Betty is lounging about reading back issues of Pureheart the Powerful, and begins to imagine life as the girlfriend of Archie-as-Pureheart. Being a superhero’s gal pal sounds like it’d be a blast, but Archie’s essential… “Archieness” begins to encroach on Betty’s fantasy, showing it to not quite be all it’s cracked up to be. Many of the weaker Archie stories across the board suffer from the same problem this one does – a lack of an actual story. There’s no plot here, no conflict, just Betty daydreaming for eight pages.

The second story, “Just Relax,” looks like it’s going to escape that trap, but quickly falls into the same problem. Betty’s summer job is wearing her out, and her father’s job isn’t much better. The Cooper family decides to take a vacation, and Betty invites Midge to come along. (I’m assuming either Veronica was on a ritzy vacation in Europe or – perhaps a little more entertaining – Betty is currently angry with her over some Archie-related shenanigan.) It’s a good set-up, but from there it’s just several pages expounding upon how Betty’s definition of relaxation differs from her father’s. Not… not really a story.

The third story, “Love the One You’re With,” is a bit better on this front. Written by Tom DeFalco, who has shown he knows a thing or two about writing teenagers, this story features Betty getting jilted (again) by Archie for a fancier date with Veronica. She turns to Dilton for a comforting shoulder, which leads Moose to make an observation about his little buddy that Betty would never realize and Dilton would never admit. You know that any time somebody tries to add a side to the Betty-Archie-Veronica love triangle it’ll only be temporary, but this is one time I think it may actually be interesting to play with it for a little while. If nothing else, it’s fun to see a story where Moose gets to be the smart one for a change.

Finally, we have “Shell Belle,” in which Betty and Jughead take a group of brownies to the beach and then help them out with an arts and crafts project. You know what, I take back what I say about the first two stories in this issue, this is a story with no plot. For heaven’s sake, the biggest word balloon in the story literally says “LET’S CLEAN UP OUR MESS!” Seriously. I suppose there’s an attempt here to give kids a project they can do at home, and you can probably use Betty’s instructions to copy their project if you really want to, but for those of us actually reading the comic, it’s unbearably dull.

Honestly, this isn’t a great issue, but it’s helped by good art throughout and a very interesting Dilton story.

Rating: 7/10

Archie #600

August 22, 2009

Archie #600 (Archie Comics)
By Michael Uslan & Stan Goldberg

The big Archie #600, part one of “Archie Marries Veronica,” finally hits. Five years in the future, upon graduating from college, Archie and his friends begin discussing their different paths — where the world is taking each of them, how the group is separating apparently for good. And Archie, thinking things over, finally makes the decision that’s been weighing on his mind for nearly 70 years. It’s an interesting comic, but not quite a great one. Michael Uslan has crafted a pretty good story. He’s got a grasp on the characters personalities, and the way Archie makes his decision makes good sense. The scene with Archie and Mr. Lodge, in particular, is very good. But there are some problems as well. Sure, this story takes place “in the future,” but Uslan basically starts with an enormous “RESET” button ready to hit in part six. Some of the dialogue is funky too — Jughead talking about Archie “dissing” their friendship just sounds like it was written by someone trying way too hard to sound like a teenager. Then there’s Betty. The story is called “Archie Marries Veronica,” but the way Betty’s part of the story is shaped the ending of this whole thing seems kind of telegraphed. It could be wrong, of course, Uslan supposedly has some surprises up his sleeve, but I’ll be watching closely. If nothing else, I’m glad Archie Comics continues to take some real storytelling risks, and I’ll be anxious to see where this story goes.
Rating: 7/10

Veronica #204

August 28, 2011

Title: All That and a Bag of Chips (New Kids Off the Wall Part Six)

Writer: Alex Simmons
Pencils: Dan Parent
Inks: Andrew Pepoy & Bob Smith
Colorist: Digikore Studios
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Cover Artist: Rex W. Lindsey
Editor: Victor Gorelick
Publisher: Archie Comics

In the final chapter of “New Kids Off The Wall,” we see…

…I… I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I’ve gotta say it. “All That and a Bag of Chips?” Really. That’s the title you go with. Whew.

Anyway, in the final chapter of “New Kids Off the Wall,” Veronica has been stunned to learn that one of the new kids at Riverdale High is in her own category of the wealthy elite. Veronica, being Veronica, decides to seek out the young moneybags and size up the competition for the top of Riverdale High School’s social pyramid. I liked this storyline all around, to be honest. The writers found a quick, plausible way to introduce several new characters into the world of Riverdale High School quickly, and they managed to make several of them stand out, with well-rounded and well thought-out personalities. This issue is a nice counterpoint to all of that, building on Veronica’s established personality to tell the sort of story that wouldn’t work with the likes of Archie, Jughead, or most of all, Betty. Veronica’s the only member of our cast to really be threatened by social competition in this way, and this gives us a totally different story than Betty facing off against one of the new kids for a job on the newspaper or the others competing for girls or in sports. This is a case where the competition, frankly, need only be in Veronica’s mind, and she’s the only one who fails to recognize that. It makes a solid story and gives her a chance to grow a little – at least as much as Archie characters ever do. After all, in this universe, we always come back to the status quo in the end.

Rating: 7/10

Betty and Veronica Double Digest #180

May 8, 2010

Betty and Veronica Double Digest #180 (Archie Comics)
By Melanie J. Morgan & Rod Whigham

In the latest Archie “New Look” story, springtime has hit Riverdale High School and the town’s top athletes are lining up to try out for the spring sports. Things are thrown into chaos, though, when Betty decides to try out for the baseball team instead of the softball team. Very few people are supportive — her former softball teammates feel like she’s abandoning them and the baseball players are threatened by a girl wanting to march on to their team. Morgan has written a lot of these “New Look” stories, and she’s got a pretty good handle on how to do them. She comes up with a story that wouldn’t be too out of place in a traditional Archie comic, finds a way to make the story last a bit longer, and makes the dialogue skew just a tad older. Whigham‘s art works well — the characters look like themselves, albiet a tad more realistic. Like all Archie digests, the rest of the book is taken up with assorted reprints of varying quality, mostly Betty and Veronica, but with a Katy Keene and Cheryl Blossom story thrown in for good measure. It’s a decent mix, and a pretty good New Look tale.
Rating: 7/10

Life With Archie (2010 Series) #11

August 1, 2011

Title: A Victim of Circumstantial & No More Mr. Nice Guy

Writer: Paul Kupperberg
Pencils: Norm Breyfogle
Inks: Al Milgrom & Bob Smith
Colorist: Glenn Whitmore         
Letterer: Janice Chiang
Publisher: Archie Comics

The Trial of Reggie Mantle continues! In the world where Archie married Veronica, Reggie’s lawyer is starting to poke holes in the case of the former Mayor who has accused Reggie of bribing him. Meanwhile, Jughead and Midge’s relationship is on the outs, Ethel’s new boyfriend isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, and an old friend is keeping an eye out for our heroes. On the flipside, we’ve got the world where Archie married Betty, became the new music teacher at Riverdale High School, and quickly learned the lesson that he can’t be too friendly with the students. Unfortunately, Archie seems to have gone too far in the other direction, turning into a disciplinarian so strict that he’s liable to lose the students altogether.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, some of my favorite moments in this series involve Archie and Betty’s adventures as teachers. This is something I can relate to really well, far more even than their high school adventures back when I was in high school. While the classic Archie stories are typically cartoony in their nature, Paul Kupperberg has done a remarkable job of applying real-world issues and situations to these characters, allowing them to grow up and face the difficulties of adulthood while still remaining true to themselves. This is true of both stories, although the situations of the main characters are very different in each world. My main problem – the face that the Jughead/Midge storyline is far too similar in both worlds – continues to be a factor, but it’s great to see that a missing friend hasn’t been forgotten, and hopefully will feature into a larger story soon.

Norm Breyfogle has really shone on this series, proving his versatility by drawing some of the most visually engaging Archie comics ever. This book has been great, and I’m happy to see it doing so well.

Rating: 8/10