"Hi," the first issue of the all new Archie series opens. "My name is Archie Andrews. Welcome to Riverdale." It's a strong and perhaps somewhat surprising opener for a book tasked with re-envisioning one of the most iconic characters in all of comics.
"The hardest character for me to get a handle on was Archie," explains the comic's writer, Mark Waid. "Everyone else was easy. Everyone was a different version of Archie. Archie is the center of the wheel. Jughead is the foodie who's also the iconoclast. Betty is the tomboy and Veronica is the rich girl."
"But other than 'all-American teen,' Waid adds. "It was hard to get a handle on the character. I thought I would just lean into it. My first job in the first issue is the to make Archie likable and relateable to readers. When I came up with the breaking the fourth wall thing, it just made sense."
Archie's look has clearly been re-imaged for the new century, courtesy of artist Fiona Staples' radically altered aesthetic, but it's on the following page that we discover what is arguably the book's biggest departure from the familiar tales of decades past. This Archie is no longer the two woman man of decades past. In fact, he and Betty just broke up.
"The biggest difference is that the whole motor of the story is no longer, 'gee, will Archie choose Betty or Veronica?' " says Waid. "It kind of makes the girls possessions that have to be fought over. We're back to the original DNA of the series, which is Archie is hot for Veronica and Betty is sort of a tomboy underdog. She loves Archie but has a hard time getting his attention."
The first issue deals with a Riverdale reeling from the dissolution of its most beloved couple, which each familiar character reacting in their characteristic way. "That was the shot across the bow," says Waid. "As we've written it, they'd been together since they since they were five, so the breakup sent seismic shockwaves across Riverdale."
In spite of the new direction, Waid insists that the feedback has been almost entirely positive thus far, a sentiment confirmed by the excited audience at today's Archie panel at Comic Con. "My hand to God, the number of people who have said to me, 'I love Archie the way he was and I hate the way you're doing it now' I can count on one hand," he says.
It's a good thing, too, because unlike past one-off and fantasy storylines like the recent death of the titular character, this new Archie is set to stick around for a while. "This is the new Archie. We're still doing classic stories in the Digests, but this is the new face of Archie. This is the new approach. If they had come to me and said they wanted to do a half-measure, I wouldn't have done it. You really need to remake these characters without sacrificing what makes them work."
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