After "Life With Archie"

The year was 2009. I was working on two major projects dealing with comic books – a chapbook called Drawn into Darkness, about Stephen King and his relationship with comics, and an entry on Tales from the Crypt and their publisher, E.C. Comics, for a comic book encyclopedia. I was covering horror comics (my first comic-book love), but I kept being dragged back into the world of Archie. King wrote a piece for the first Archie Americana collection that intrigued me, and I couldn’t escape the fact that the first publisher of Archie, Jon Goldwater, spearheaded the Comics Code (a self-imposed rule that restricted what comics could show and talk about), which effectively put E.C. Comics out of business.

I am often drawn to pop culture with deep history, especially if that pop culture is ongoing. That’s where my Disney thing comes from, not to mention my interest in things like the New York Times Bestseller List. The fact that Archie existed in the 1940s and keeps existing thrills me. I bought old collections and read pop histories of the company and the comic. Then I started buying the regular comics, like Archie and Betty & Veronica, hoping against hope that a new Josie & the Pussycats comic would launch soon. Man, I loved those cat ears.

Then a few interesting things happened. In 2010, a new comic called Life with Archie hit stores. It told two stories in two alternate future timelines: one in which Archie marries Betty, one in which he marries Veronica. The stories were fascinating. Pushing the Riverdale gang into young adulthood was only the beginning. They killed off Miss Grundy – in both storylines! Kevin Keller married a dude! Cheryl Blossom had cancer! Moose Mason became the mayor! And on. And on. It was a bit soapy, but that worked. For a long time, it was my absolute favorite comic. I looked forward to it every single month, to catch up with what my pals in Riverdale were up to, what predicaments they would find themselves in, and who they’d fall in and out of love with.

I loved the writing, which was a bit more sophisticated than that of the regular Archie books, and I loved the serialized nature of the story. Both those aspects filtered into the regular Archie books, which started doing miniseries and sci-fi and fantasy and pretty much anything they wanted. Kevin Keller had been introduced as the first gay Archie character, and he got his own comic. In one storyline, Archie fell in love with Valerie of Josie and the Pussycats, and they got married and had a child and it was all very cute. Afterlife With Archie, a remarkably mature and unsettling ongoing zombie story, debuted and captured me and a mass audience. I got a Moose Mason tattoo. And somewhere in there, I started … well, I started livetweeting the Archie comics, poking gentle fun at the characters and their crazy situations as I read them.

1950s Moose Tattoo

But never Life with Archie. That was sacred. That was my comic. And now it’s coming to an end.

Deaths of comic-book characters have been making headlines for awhile now. When I was in high school, the death of Superman was a big deal. More recently, Captain America’s death was all over the actual news. Those guys came back. And it’s not like Archie – the “regular universe” Archie – is really going anywhere. But an Archie, the one I liked the most, in the comic I liked the most, is dying. I knew that going into the issue, and I knew that he was going to die heroically. I was prepared. I was ready.

I was neither prepared nor ready.

For this penultimate issue, both alternate future universes – the Betty Universe and the Veronica Universe – merge. Pronouns proliferate. Archie is in love with her; he’s thinking about what she is doing. This is important, because we need to know that in any timeline, any story, any take, Archie Andrews is fundamentally the same: a good guy who loves his friends, his town, his life. The entire issue is a celebration of all that. He ruminates on the past, laments that he doesn’t often think about the future, and keeps running into the people in the present who help define him.

It works as both an elegy and an introduction, a significant balancing act writer Paul Kupperberg is more than up to handling. The death scene is as shocking and tragic as you might expect – more so, actually. This isn’t a super hero’s death. Archie’s just a guy, doing the right thing. The final panel, of an ice cream soda with three straws, knocked on its side, is heavy with both symbolism and history. A passing knowledge of the Archie comic immediately brings to mind that iconic image of Archie, Betty, and Veronica sharing a soda, all smiles. No one’s smiling now.

It’s a fitting end to this version of the character. The next issue, ONE YEAR LATER, will hopefully pick up the pieces and offer more reflection. We’re promised that “this is only the beginning” – a hopeful phrase whose importance has yet to be determined. For now, though, I’m going to read this issue again (and again), and say good-bye to the fictional friend I made four years ago. I’m sure going to miss him.