Archie, Year One

Did anybody else succumb to temptation and look at the first issue of the Archie: the Freshman Year miniseries? I did, and I enjoyed it.

In a way, it's pointless to treat Archie characters as characters with continuity, a history, and the other things we associate with "serious" comic book characters; these characters were always meant to function in short stories that had no connection to one another, and to be teenagers forever. But it's still fun to see someone try to create a history for the characters we grew up with, and connect everything together, and that's basically what Bill Galvan and Batton Lash appear to be doing here. The idea is not only that these characters are in the process of developing into their "final" versions, but that all the versions of Archie fit into the same world, so there are references to the Little Archie world (and the fact that Mr. Weatherbee used to be at Little Archie's school and has apparently somehow transferred to high school just in time to meet Archie again), but even the spinoff series like Pureheart the Powerful and The Man From R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. Anyone who grew up reading all those stories can't help but smile at the obvious affection this comic has for the Archie "world."