REVIEW: Fiona Staples is Forcing Me to Care About Archie
Archie Andrews is kind of a bad guy.
Let’s face it – everyone’s favourite redhead has spent the last 75 years pitting two girls against each other in a never ending war for his affection; scheming and manipulating his classmates for a chance to bask in the limelight; and all for a cheap and “wholesome” laugh. He’s the Zack Morris of comics: a no good schemer, I tell ya!
Or at least, he was. The Archie we’ve come to know from the likes of Double Digest comics and the bizarre Archie’s Weird Mysteries ’90s cartoon has stepped aside to let Fiona Staples and Mark Waid’s modern reinvention of the character pull in audiences both new and old. My affection for Staples’ other series, Saga, wouldn’t let me ignore her work in Archie, and with Issue #2 out today, it seemed fitting to cover everything this series is doing right, and how the first issue ended this ex-Archie hater’s boycott of all things Riverdale.
Fiona Staples’ art has a tremendously humanizing style to it, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the opening splash page of Archie #1. Almost identical to the art style Staples draws in her and Brian K. Vaughan’s acclaimed Saga series, Archie Andrews has never looked so personable (I like to imagine that this book actually takes place on a planet within Saga’s universe, and that Archie is really The Will’s nephew). Add this to Andre Szymanowicz’s vibrant colouring and Mark Waid’s clever and modern dialogue, and you have a cast of Riverdalians that I want to get to know.
Archie and Jughead are playing a Wii U. I REPEAT. WII U SPOTTED!
But the best thing the new Archie currently has going for it comes from the refreshing way it approaches the romantic relationships that are so seminal to these characters. Betty, Veronica, and Archie aren’t empty-headed caricatures whose only actions are focused on hatching new schemes to win one another over. Instead, the series starts off with Archie and Betty fresh off a breakup that both parties are painfully trying to avoid thinking about. The details of the breakup are left a mystery, presumably to be unraveled in future issues, but it’s clear the characters in this retelling are far more complex than what’s come before: whatever happened between Betty and Archie can’t be fixed by sharing a milkshake at Pop’s.
Archie # 2 is available at comic shops and online today, and if it’s anything like the series’ first issue, perhaps I’ll need to patch things up with my old Arch-nemesis. Had I been asked if Archie could be relevant a few years back, I would have certainly said no. Now, thanks to Fiona Staples’ beautiful drawings, the equally impressive storytelling of Mark Waid, and everyone involved on the new series, Archie is kind of cool again.
