Archie: The Best of Dan DeCarlo (IDW, $24.99)
Archie Firsts (Dark Horse, $24.99)
The best archivist and anthologist of old Archie comics remains Archie Comics Publications itself. The companies digests and trade paperbacks are affordable, variety-filled and plentiful. But the Archie company has also recently been granting reprint rights to some of the best coffe-table-book compilers in the comics realm.

Dark Horse and IDW not only seize on whole different eras for their 25-buck collections of Archiana, they’re distinct in how they present the comics as well. The main similarity is how loosely they play within their narrow themes.

Dark Horse offers Archie Firsts—Featuring the First Appearances of Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Archie. Seems an easy enough dictum, until you realize that those five characters’ debuts are all covered with a mere three adventures. (Archie, Betty and Jughead are all accounted for in the very first, and oft-reprinted Archie story from Pep #22.) Rather than extend the theme into future Archie eras—digging up the debuts of Moose Mason, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Josie & the Pussycats or Veronica’s cousin Leroy, for instance—the Dark Horse compilers decide to stick in the 1940s, which means several stories each from the first issues of later titles in the Archie series: Archie’s Pal Jughead (which began in 1949 and continues to this day, though it’s changed issue-numbering schemes a few times), Archie’s Rival Reggie (also 1949; the title changed to Reggie & Me and eventually expired in the 1980) and Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica (1950, after they’d been core members of the Archie establishment for nearly a decade).

Archie Firsts’ packaging is elegant—the crisp orange dust jacket can be removed to reveal a “Riverdale High School” insignia emblazoned on the book itself—but the pages are meant to mimic (in a sturdier, cleaner, archival-quality manner) the cheap newsprint on which these stories were originally printed.

Archie—The Best of Dan DeCarlo goes the slick route. The back cover of this 150-page Volume One states that “each of these wonderful pages has been reproduced from Dan DeCarlo’s original art and faithfully re-colored to match its look when it was originally published.” No little ink-dots here and yellowed backgrounds here—it’s all so pop-art clean, on blindingly shiny paper, that you might think you’re looking at a collection of Archie comics’ front covers rather than their insides.

Let’s hope there are several more volumes, since everything here is from a period in the late ‘50s and ‘60s when the great DeCarlo (who served Archie for half a century) didn’t change his style a whole lot. Personally, I think the covers and stories designed in the 1980s are hugely underrated in Archie fan circles, and there’s a wealth of extraordinary (and groovy) ‘70s material besides.

Volume One has a whole lot of stories where very little happens, just some well-scripted chat, and how DeCarlo delineates the mundane is what gives this book its oomph. While Betty and Veronica hold their endless debate about Archie’s inadequacies and their own needs, they change their clothes, indulge in daydreams, and move theatrically around rooms. It’s during this period that DeCarlo began to develop his signature filmic style of placing supporting characters (more often than not, nameless bystanders) in the foreground of the comics panels. The way he fluidly switches angles and horizons is mesmerizing. But DeCarlo’s peripatetic drawings complement rather than just animate the equally amazingly casual crafting of the words these dizzy teens are spouting. The scripts to all but two or three of the 26 stories here are by Frank Doyle. He was as important a figure in the cultural endurance of Archie as was DeCarlo, publishers John Goldwater and Michael Silberkleit, editor Victor Gorelick or anyone else involved in these characters during the 20th century. It would be fairer to title this series “The Best of Dan DeCarlo and Frank Doyle.”

My shelf of Archie hardcovers has expanded by several inches in just the last few months. I still buy the digest reprints and the new comics avidly, and I think that the neatest reprint packages of the past few years are the CD-Rom compendia of “Bronze Age” Archies (and Jugheads and Betty and Veronicas—a decade’s worth of each title per disk) put out a few years ago by GIT Corp. But these hardcovers are well worth the expense. It’s nice to have someone validate your tastes so lavishly and lovingly, whether the urge is nostalgic or art-restorative. As later collections should reveal (it’s a ’70s catchphrase), Everything’s Archie.