Five Archie Statements
Bad and accidental skiing and surfboarding stunts win prizes rather than well-practiced professional ones.
Two women can not wear the same style of dress at the same event without a major altercation.
All pop music, to parents, is loud and obnoxious.
When a student is late to class, it is customary to sneak into the room on hands and knees.
Gift-buying is frequently observed surreptitiously by a rival gift-buyer.

’Tis the time of year when periodicals are obliged to share their audited circulation information publicly, in small print in the back pages. It’s a law, so that publications can’t, for instance, lie about the size of their readership when soliciting advertisers.
I find that I am in a rather select club. I subscribe to all the regular Archie Comics titles (the ones featuring Archie and friends, that is, not the same publisher’s Sonic the Hedgehog or superhero series), and I’m noticing that none of these titles have more than 1000 subscribers or so. That’s worldwide, apparently. Total paid circulation of each Archie title tends to be in the 40,000 or 50,000 range, though well over twice that number of copies may be printed, returned by newsstands and presumably recycled. That process is as it always has been, though the numbers used to be much larger. Digital comics must take up a lot of the slack, as do variant covers and other enticements that goose sales of titles that last for only a few issues or a few years.
There used to be dozens of regularly published Archie comics. With this year’s cancellation of the Life With Archie magazine and the Kevin Keller Comic (which was the last vestige of the old Veronica title), there are now just eleven. Seven of those are digest magazines filled largely with reprints (not that I’m complaining; I’m really enjoying the reprints these days). Two are the slick, adult-oriented horror comics Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That means Archie is now publishing just two all-original comic-book sized comic books in the trad Archie mode: Archie (published monthly) and Betty & Veronica (bi-monthly).
I remain a loyal subscriber. In fact, I’d happily subscribe to a lot more Archie titles if they existed. But I get that I’m select audience—one of a thousand.

I am suddenly curious about Archie’s Weird Mysteries. I had little interest in the show when it originally aired from 1999-2001—my cable provider didn’t carry the PAX channel on which it aired, I had tax liens which affected how much I could spend on comics (not to mention food) in general, and the cartoons were kind of an Archie aberration in terms of style and flow.
Having finally felt ready to partake of this curious precursor of such recent supernatural Archie adventures as Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Tales of Sabrina, I found that I could buy a box set of the complete 40-episode series for less than eight dollars on Amazon.
I watched the entire first disk—three hours and ten episodes long, plus a bonus episode of Sabrina the Animated Series—in two sittings, while doing listings work at my desk. It makes for excellent background viewing: colorful, easy to follow and, at least to me, effortlessly appealing because it involves Archie characters.
There are in-jokes for fans, such as a reference to Archies vocalist Ron Dante. The central Archie characters maintain the characteristics of their comic book counterparts, as distilled through golden age of Hollywood stereotypes: everyteen Archie is the hero, Jughead his goofy sidekick, Dilton the scientist who explains things, Betty the damsel in distress, Reggie and Veronica the wild cards who, when afflicted by supernatural phenomena, may use their newfound powers for evil or egocentric means.
Not nearly as bad as I’d always feared, Archie’s Weird Mysteries ends each episode with a reminder that all these horror scenarios are happening in the supposedly sleepy town of Riverdale, and that small-town nature is neatly conveyed in a manner which the old Life With Archie adventure comic books couldn’t always manage.
Still, Archie’s Weird Mysteries has some weird premise: Archie is a teen journalist who writes a weekly column about strange doings in his hometown. The column is popular and well-read (it’s even followed by an X-Files-like duo of government agents who appear in the episode “The Jughead Incident). Yet in every single episode, Archie’s friends remain incredulous that there could be such things as, say, werewolves, when they’ve already apparently dealt with mummies, ghosts and demons, and been affected by spells or potions that have rendered them gigantic, invisible or zombie-esque. Unlike the original Scooby Doo series, where there was good reason for the Mystery Machine gang to be eternally skeptical of supposed supernatural chicanery, in Weird Mysteries actual monsters, ghouls and space aliens commonly cross paths with Archie et al.
Archie’s Weird Mysteries is second only to the golden age Archie radio program as the longest-running broadcast series to feature the Riverdale characters. It’s far-fetched and a truly bizarre use of this largely reality-based comic book ensemble, but somehow it doesn’t hurt the legacy at all.

Veronicaism:
“Obviously the photographer must have taken my photo when I wasn’t looking… Awk! It’s a picture of Betty! Not me!”

Interesting lead story in the new issue of World of Archie Comics Double Digest (#48), which just arrived. The script for “Snack Attack” is by Tania Del Rio, who usually draws her own work and has a manga sensibility. Art is by Rex Lindsey, the longtime Jughead artist given to longer adventures. Both Del Rio and Lindsey tend to use more dialogue and panels than is the norm for Archie creators, so it’s a good fit. The story’s weird—absurd and excessive, with an obvious but well-rendered ending.
Big range of artists in this particular digest: DeCarlo and Goldberg, of course, but also Bolling, Parent, Ruiz, Vigoda, Colan and Dan DeCarlo Jr.
As for non-Archie stories, there’s quite a lot of Suzie and Super Duck. The Suzie tales feature a lot of provocative pin-up poses, neatly balanced elsewhere in the book by a Miss Beazly fashion page.

Veronicaism:
“I’m big enough to make allowances for poor folk who can’t afford maids.”

New on Archie Unlimited: a “digital exclusive” graphic novel called Dancing With the Archies. A frightening large percentage of the stories have to do with Archie and the gang discovering swing dancing, only to have their parents and school administrators crash the trend by showing up in their old zoot suits and gowns. The collection also features the all-time classic Harry Lucey-drawn story where Archie can’t stop dancing. “You’d better drive,” he tells Veronica, who gets behind the wheel of Archie’s jalopy while he dances on the front hood of the vehicle.

Here’s a new-media wrinkle: a lightly animated Veronica cartoon, “Riverdale Royalty,” on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjpiRCRrQIU. It’s got a single gag about how Veronica takes advantage of Reggie, a jaunty video-game-type music score, and no spoken dialogue. Speech balloons (and sighs, and hearts, and plumes of smoke) appear over the characters’ heads with expert comic timing, giving the joke a perky momentum. There’s a briskness and brightness to the whole endeavor that’s frankly captivating. What colors! What light! What a refreshing minute and eleven seconds!

From the Jughead story “The Invader” (script by George Gladir):
Mr. Lodge: Jughead’s in the kitchen.
Archie (with guitar): Now there’s a musical cue if I ever heard one!
Veronica: Hit it!
Archie: Jughead’s in the kitchen. I know oh, Jughead’s in the kitchen with Dinah, strummin’ on the old banjo.
Veronica: Tee hee!
Mr. Lodge: He’s not strummin’ on the ol’ banjo! He’s eating us out of house and home!

Five Random Young Women of Riverdale
Tandalayo Snickle-Fritz, “the prettiest new girl”
Ophelia Krutzenhaber-Schnopper, man-hungry early blonde version of Big Ethel
Sheila Jackson (one of many attractive women whom Jughead develops an interest in only because her father owns a restaurant).
Jackie Frost (whose lips freeze to Jughead’s during a kiss)
Melanie Morris (whose father is the head of the Riverdale “Polar Plungers” club)