Archie Freshman Year, Book 2

Catching Up With Archie Week continues with a book that both looks forward and back, Archie Freshman Year, Book 2. I enjoyed the first volume in the series so much I came back for more.

The set-up by comic vets Batton Lash (of Wolff and Bird fame), Bill Galvan (creator of The Scrapyard Detectives), and Al Milgrom (co-creator of Firestorm and former editor at Marvel and DC) is to tell untold stories from the past about the Archie characters. In this book, we learn about why Jughead got his iconic S t-shirt and some more throw-away stories where Betty and Veronica make a YouTube movie for a radio contest, Reggie tries to hang out with older students, Chuck draws comic books, and new character Pencilneck G gets the gang involved in skateboarding and Jackass-style hi-jinks. Apart from the first story, this volume seemed more slight to me, not to say that the stories were not enjoyable. They just did not seem exceptional from regular Archie stories, only set in an earlier time period with some more contemporary references added.

Thinking about this book, and looking back at the rest of this week's offerings, it strikes me that as a whole Archie Comics are very much about the passage of time, looking at history, and dealing with change. That is not something I would have expected going into this week, and it might not be the grandest insight ever, but there it is. I might not always greet the conservative tenor of much of their books with open arms, but perhaps the willingness to grapple with issues of time and change are what have sustained the company for so long, as crops of new readers find stories that seem at once timeless but also very much interested in the passage of time and change to engage with.

Maybe I will get more insight into this matter tomorrow when I read about what I think is the most striking addition to the Archie cast: Kevin Keller.

Archie: Freshman Year, Book 1

Archie and the gang seem to have been in high school forever, but this book tells the tales of their early days in that institution. It explains how Mr. Weatherbee managed to be their elementary and high school principal, and it also introduces us to the the teachers and students of Riverdale High. We see the start of many conventions, including Moose and Midge's relationship and the Betty-Archie-Veronica triangle. There is even some drama after Jughead is forced to move when his father takes a new job, and the older students make life unpleasant for the newcomers.

The comics in this book originally were published serially as five issues. The story was written by Batton Lash, famous for his long-running series Wolff and Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre. He also wrote the unlikely yet extremely satisfying team-up Archie Meets the Punisher as well as a number of Radioactive Man adventures from Bongo Comics. Bill Galvan, known for his work on The Scrapyard Detectives, provides art in his variation on the classic Archie style. He explains his work on this book in this interview, and this interview with Mark Haney also touches on the future of this series.

Archie: Freshman Year has been a success as a comic book and an Apple app. A number of positive reviews of it can be found at Goodreads.

A preview of this volume can be found at Comixology. A preview for the upcoming sequel can be seen here at the School Library Journal blog.