In a Sunday evening stunner, the New York Times revealed that Archie Comics are relaunching their flagship series – “Archie”, of course – with a new #1 in 2015 from a frankly shocking creative team: writer Mark Waid and artist Fiona Staples.
Waid and Staples will be attempting to reimagine characters like Jughead, Betty, Veronica and Archie for modern audiences, making them contemporary but still kids in the process, and you can see some of Staples ideas for the characters above. “Over the years, some of the sharp edges have been sanded off,” Waid said. “They are kids, and they should act as kids.”
It makes a whole lot of sense, and it’s all part of Archie’s big moves over the past years in books like “Afterlife with Archie”, “Sabrina”, and with Kevin Keller being introduced to the universe in making their section of the comic world more relevant to the industry and its readers. A team of Waid and Staples does a tremendous amount in no time flat, and I have to imagine that first issue is going to be a monster seller.
According to Staples, she’ll only be penciling the first three issues and it won’t be impacting her Saga schedule, so the dream team will only have a short run. Either way, if they were looking to launch “Archie” in 2015 with a pair of creators who can make a book relevant to all, I think they picked about as fine of a duo as they possibly can. Congrats to the team involved, and we’re looking forward to what’s next for Archie Comics in 2015.
Update: MTV News posted some character design pages from Fiona Staples, and we’ve posted them below:
