Title: Archie
Issue: 600
Date: October, 2009
Publisher: Archie Comics
Writer: Michael Uslan
Penciler: Stan Goldberg
Inker: Bob Smith
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Colorist: Glenn Whitmore
Editor: Victor Gorelick
This milestone-number issue is also the first installment of the "Archie Marries Veronica" storyline. This is basically a "What If?". Archie, about to graduate from high school, with no idea of where his future is heading, goes for a walk in Riverdale, and finds himself on Memory Lane. But this time, instead of walking backwards in time, he tries out the other direction. The lane becomes a path in the woods, that splits, in a little bit of a Robert Frost reference, setting up this series along with the parallel "Archie Marries Betty story.
From there we leap into the future, where Archie and his friends are now college grads, finally going their separate ways (including one to Bayonne NJ! Yay Bayonne!) after four years at State U.
With Veronica about to depart on a round-the-world cruise, Archie makes the biggest decision of his life.
The scenes with Archie and Jughead had some good dialogue, and I enjoyed the general vibe of good friends having to part ways, and looking forward to different futures.
The stuff with Veronica and her caricature-level rich father were the usual silliness, and some of the sentiment around Betty "losing" in her rivalry felt forced. The story implied that Archie and Veronica had been dating steadily through college, and I was left wondering why Betty hadn't moved on.
Like a lot of the relatively recent Archie books I've read, this was pretty heavily playing up the nostalgia, with mixed, but generally positive results for me.
Rating: 7/10
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