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The year was 2015, and Archie Comics was in need of a facelift. Archie Andrews and his Riverdale High classmates had been entertaining comic readers since 1941, but by the 21^st century things had slowed down. The teen comedy comics line had modest sales, but they were never going to compete with Marvel, DC, or Image.

Hoping to reenergize the line, Archie Comics came up with their New Riverdale publishing initiative, which reimagined Archie as a teen drama. The characters were given a more realistic art style, and gags were discarded in favor of more serious storytelling. Mark Waid, a writer famous for his work in the superhero genre, was brought on to write Archie, the new line’s flagship title. For Waid this was a challenge, as Archie wasn’t a character he had given a lot of thought to.

“That’s an example of a character I had given zero thought to before taking that book on,” Mark Waid says during an appearance on SKTCHD’s Off Panel. “We all knew because those characters are one-dimensional as hell. There’s no ‘there’ there, so I hadn’t given any thought to it. So, it really is a matter of, okay, it’s not just that I’ve been thinking about these characters all my life, because when I look at it through that lens, well, I hadn’t been thinking about Archie all my life, but it was the same process. Just sitting down and just vomiting out everything I can think of that makes this character unique and interesting and so forth. And I ended up with like a 25-page manifesto.”

Mark Waid’s Archie debuted with strong sales and IGN crowned it the Best New Series of 2015. Archie, and all the other New Riverdale spinoffs like Jughead and Betty and Veronica, reinvigorated the characters for a new generation, and inspired Warner Brothers Television to develop the popular Riverdale teen drama. It turns out there was a lot more ‘there’ there than Waid had realized.

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