Woah: Fiona Staples and Mark Waid rebooting ‘Archie’ comic
How do you get me to read Archie? You stick Fiona Staples on the artwork. Oh, and Mark Waid penning the title doesn’t hurt.
2015 marks the 75th anniversary of Archie Comics, but the company is following up a series of bold and unexpected moves with something that’d be entirely normal at certain other comics companies we could name… it’s restarting and renumbering its flagship series with a brand new, acclaimed writer/artist team.
Archie Comics has come a long way over the past few years from the check-out-line comics that I stopped asking my mom to buy for me right around the time that I stopped reading Disney Adventures. They introduced disabled, brown, and, most famously, gay teens to Riverdale; they started up and successfully continued two future parallel universes to explore the adult troubles of the Archie gang in a world where Archie married either Betty or Veronica; and they’ve got an ongoing series about what happens when the zombie apocalypse hits Riverdale, written and drawn by artists best known for teen television, pulp adventure, and noir heroes.
It seems ironic, in a year when both of the Big Two of American comics publishing are pinning their big maxi-events on reader nostalgia for old story arcs, that Archie Comics is celebrating its 75th anniversary by telling an entirely new story with a “new direction.”
Seriously. I’m going to buy this comic. And be happy about it.