Archie #600

From the Random Stack of Unread Comics.

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

Little Archie: The House That Wouldn't Move

 From the random stack of unread comics.

Title: Little Archie: The House That Wouldn't Move
Date: 2007
Publisher: Archie Comics
Writer: Dexter Taylor, Bob Bolling
Artist: Dexter Taylor, Bob Bolling
Editor: Victor Gorelick, Nelson Ribeiro, Richard Goldwater

This is an ashcan-format freebie from Archie Comics containing two Little Archie stories (technically the second is labeled as a Little Betty & Veronica story, but both stories actually feature Little Archie and Little Betty).

First up is the title story, "The House That Wouldn't Move", which involves Little Archie helping the resident ghost of the local haunted house resist the efforts of a work crew sent to demolish the place to clear the way for a new highway.

The second story features some dog vs. cat antics when Little Archie's dog, Spotty, chases Little Betty's cat, Caramel, up a tree.

Both stories are kid-friendly, with pretty simple and straightforward plots. There are some funny moments, and the artwork looks good throughout.

Rating: 6/10

Mighty Archie Players: Free Comic Book Day Edition #1

Back from a week of traveling in northern Vietnam, and back to the random stack of unread comics!

Title: Mighty Archie Players: Free Comic Book Day Edition
Issue: 1
Date: June, 2009
Publisher: Archie Comics
Writer: George Gladir
Artist: Stan Goldberg
Editor: Victor Gorelick, Mike Pellerito

Four stories here, each one a parody of a movie genre, with the familiar Riverdale Gang characters playing the various roles.

"High Noonish" is a classic western, with Archie as the marshal, who is about to trade in his guns and badge for wedded bliss when three old enemies come to town looking for trouble.

The second story is "Snow White and the Three Giant Dwarfs", because apparently the Mighty Archie Players don't have much in the way of a special effects budget. The story follows the classic fairy tale with a somewhat more modern vibe.

Third is "Marcia the Mermaid" with Betty in the title role, and Archie as the love interest, Scuba Joe. This is a pretty straightforward mermaid romance.

Last up, and the funniest of the bunch is "Once Upon A Time Along the Nile", a Cleopatra (actually, Cleaopatricia, played by Veronica) drama that is loaded with awful (in the best sense of the word!) puns. This one had some humor that may be lost on younger readers, but had me laughing.

As with many of the recent Archie Comics products, this book does a nice job of working with the reader's familiarity with the iconic Riverdale characters, and allowing the writer to jump right into the different stories.

This was a fun book with some good laughs.

Rating: 7/10

Archie #666

From the unread comics stack. I got this issue at a comic shop in the US last summer, just on the notoriety of it being the final issue of such a long run.

Title: Archie
Issue: 666
Date: July, 2015
Publisher: Archie Comics
Writer: Tom Defalco
Penciler: Dan Parent, Fernando Ruiz, Tim Kennedy
Inker: Rich Koslowski
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Colorist: Glenn Whitmore
Editor: Victor Gorelick

An epic run comes to an end with the 666th (with a few offhand references to "the end" as the only acknowledgement of the infamy of that number) installment to Archie. This is an ending, but only for the purpose of rebooting the series.

The story here is that Archie has racked up 666 detentions, and it's finally about to get him expelled from Riverdale High. As the news spread, Archie's friends reminisce on the well-intentioned mayhem that has accompanied Archie, and they make plans to try to save him from having to finish high school across town.

There were a couple of sly references to some of the alternate-timeline Archie books that Archie Comics has put out lately, but otherwise, this story was bland nostalgia with a few sentimental moments.

The format of the book leans heavily on short flashbacks and light on new plot. That being said, the simple story was well executed and did a nice job of capturing the essentials of what makes Archie and his friends such enduring characters.

Rating: 6.5/10

Pep Comics Free Comic Book Day Edition

Still working my way through the FCBD stack. This is a 2011 freebie.

Title: Pep Comics
Date: May, 2011
Publisher: Archie Comics
Writer: Dan Parent
Penciler: Dan Parent
Inker: Jim Amash
Letterer: Patrick Owsley
Colorist: Digikore Studios
Editor: Victor Gorelick

Following an afternoon of reminiscing about the rival clubs they had as kids, Betty and Veronica decide it's time to form a new Archie Club to help out latchkey kids around town who need some good after-school activities. But a Jughead prank soon has Veronica setting up a club of her own in the Lodge Rec Room.

Now that they're older, can the gang avoid the rivalries that split up their clubs when they were kids? And can they get past those rivalries for the sake of helping out the younger generation?

While nothing particularly shocking or unexpected goes on here, this story is logical, good-natured, and satisfying.

Rating: 7/10

Archie 1: The Dawn Of Time

Title: Archie 1: The Dawn Of Time
Date: 2010
Publisher: Archie Comics
Art: Doug Crane
Production: Stephen Oswald, Carlos Antunes, Jon Gray
Editor: Victor Gorelick

Ashcan format promo book. No credit given for the writing for some reason. Archie 1 is the caveman version of the Archie series, featuring a set of "ancestors" who just happen to look and act exactly like their Riverdale counterparts. Well, they look exactly like the Archie gang except that they're all dressed in the latest caveman fashion. And here you were thinking that Betty and Veronica in 1 Million Years BC style leopard-skin bikinis was something you'd have to delve into fanfic to find. Two stories here. The first is a pretty straightforward Tarzan parody, with the girls meeting up with a rather "primitive" (by which we mean the male chauvinist type of caveman) king of the jungle complete with monkey sidekick. Betty and Veronica put their rivalry aside to present a fairly united front against the jungle buffoon. The second story is an amusing bit of nonsense about the invention of language. Apparently, yelling "Vamoose!" is effective in warding off dinosaurs. There were some laughs to be had here, but this seems a bit more limited compared to seeing the same characters in the standard Riverdale setting.

Rating: 5.5/10