The Archie Encyclopedia | Review

The Archie Encyclopedia
Writers: Jamie Lee Rotante, Ian Flynn, Caty Koehl and Gillian Swearingen
Artists: Various
Archie Comics; $19.99

Archie Andrews, the character the comics publisher MLJ eventually renamed itself after, debuted 82-years ago, and the company was around two years before that. That adds up to a lot of comics stories, and, most importantly, a lot of different characters. So many, in fact, that they could fill up an entire encyclopedia. And now so they have.

The Archie Encyclopedia is a dense, 300-page tome featuring all of the residents of Riverdale, and thus those that appear in the adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica and company, but also has sections devoted to Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, Josie and The Pussycats, Katy Keene, Lil’ Jinx, Cosmo and, most intriguing, “Everyone Else.”

The bigger the star the more space they’re afforded, obviously. With Archie and his inner circle, the entries can run as long as 18 pages, beginning with a standard profile including hair and eye color, likes and dislikes and basic biography, and then running down different iterations of the character and/or their adventures. With Archie, this includes (deep breath) his band The Archies, Archie: Freshman Year, The New Archies, Little Archie and his Pals, Pureheart the Powerful, Archie as The Man From R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., Archie’s Explorers of the Unknown, Archie’s Weird Mysteries, Archie 3000, Archie 1941, Archie 1955, the various Archie Meets…crossovers, Life With Archie, Afterlife With Archie and finally television’s Riverdale.

But hey, he’s the guy the company’s named after. The profiles get progressively smaller as they move on from the likes of Tony Topaz and Ethel Muggs to Ginger Lopez and Cricket O’Dell, teen characters eventually only getting a line or three each. That’s followed by a section on Riverdale’s adults (including all of the original characters from Life With Archie), then one on little kids and pets.

The Riverdale section is by far the largest, but those devoted to the other comic characters are similarly thorough, all heavily illustrated with art that spans the history of the feature, from classic work from Dan DeCarlo through various “new look” versions of the characters by the likes of Fiona Staples. Along with the cover, Dan Parent seems to have drawn the lion’s share of the illustrations, and indeed, he’s the first credited among the almost 70 artists whose work is sampled, who are otherwise listed alphabetically by their first names.

Given the space devoted to alternate takes on the main cast, the book functions in part as an effective advertisement for various idiosyncratic Archie projects, like Afterlife With Archie, Vixens, Jughead: The Hunger and so on.

Perhaps the most unexpected part of the book is the “Everyone Else” section, which features other, lesser-known teen protagonists like Suzie, Ginger Snap and Bingo Wilkin, as well as various funny animal character, action-adventure stars and even a few superheroes (The “Red Circle” heroes like The Shield, The Fox, and The Mighty Crusaders are curiously absent, although the Crusaders are mentioned in an entry for a Doc Reeves).

All told, it’s a pretty excellent introduction to the world of Riverdale and Archie Comics, and an invaluable resource for readers who want to know more about the many minor characters that populate the adventures of Archie and friends.

If I have any complaints, it’s that the encyclopedia is organized by character’s profile within the comics, rather than like a normal encyclopedia would be, alphabetically. So if one did want to look up, say, Bobbi Suarez or Simon “Prankenstein” Silverstein, one would have to flip through the section on Riverdale teens at random, rather than finding them immediately.

The other is that the “first appearance” notation, which includes the year and title of a character’s first appearance, is pretty unevenly applied throughout the book. I found it useful to determine a character’s real-world origins (it’s clear, for example, that Archie Comics get much more diverse the closer to the present they get) and interesting to find where the characters popped up. It would have been especially useful in the “Everybody Else” section, where it unfortunately disappears.

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