Archie: The Decision #1 | Review

Archie: The Decision #1
Writer: Tom King
Artists: Dan Parent and Bob Smith
Archie Comics; $3.99

Archie: The Decision #1, a one-shot comic in which Archie presumably finally decides between Betty and Veronica and potentially ends an eight-decade long love triangle, seems more like an opportunity for the writer to cross something off his bucket list than a story with a compelling reason for being.

Not that it doesn’t make perfect sense that writer Tom King and publisher Archie Comics pursued the collaboration and released the results, of course.

For Archie, it was the opportunity to work with a big-name creator from the world of super-comics. Probably best known for his well-read 2016-2020 run on Batman, King is currently writing Wonder Woman, and his resume also includes well-received new takes on less famous DC Comics heroes like Mister Miracle, The Human Target and The Omega Men.

And for King, an avowed fan of Archie Comics, it was an opportunity to play with the publisher’s catalog of characters and work with their signature modern artist Dan Parent, without the more significant commitment of a graphic novel or mini-series.

King certainly makes use of that chance to write Archie characters, including not only the main cast and regular supporting characters, and not only Josie and The Pussycats and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but practically the whole Archie Encyclopedia worth of characters, at one point having a character rattling off a list of names of Archie characters (a sequence that climaxes with a That Wilkin Boy joke). Parent also obliges this get-them-all in effort, his crowd scenes including such unlikely characters as superhero The Shield and Cosmo the Merry Martian.

The full-length story is essentially a single, 20-page long gag story, with jokes liberally sprinkled throughout. Archie and Jughead are sitting around, and our hero is lamenting his eternal dilemma of choosing between Betty and Veronica. (“Feels like I’ve been trying to make up my mind for eighty years!” Archie complains. “Maybe even eighty-four years,” Jughead says.)

Unable to take it anymore, Archie vows to make a decision once and for all, and he resorts to the tried-and-true method of choosing between two options: Flipping a coin. That simple act goes wrong, however, when the coin flies out the window, and begins rolling down the street.

Archie and Jughead give chase, and despite Jughead vowing not to tell anyone about the coin toss, word quickly spreads, first to Betty and Veronica themselves, then to Reggie and Archie’s circle of friends at Pop’s, and then quickly throughout the publisher’s extended cast of characters, until it seems that the whole city is chasing Archie…who is chasing the coin…to see what the decision is.

The coin does finally stop rolling, and the entire crowd does confront Archie, demanding to know who won the decision. I won’t spoil it here, but for a gag upon which the entire story hinges, it has an obvious problem (I noticed it during the set-up on page five and thought it odd at that moment, so the conclusion didn’t surprise so much as disappoint me).

Still, it’s an amusing enough lark of a story, and King did pack enough jokes throughout his script so that even if the main one fell flat, there should be more than enough to make the reading worthwhile.

It’s also a nice distillation of Archie Comics in general, a nice introduction to new readers (or reintroduction to lapsed readers) of all the characters and their specific deals and, thanks to the always reliable artwork of pencil artist Parent, it looks, feels and reads like the platonic ideal of a modern Archie comic book.

Given King’s stature in the direct market—Archie president and editor-in-chief Mike Pellerito calls him “one of the biggest names in the industry” in an editorial explaining the genesis of the book—there’s a pretty good chance that plenty of new (or lapsed) readers will be checking out Archie: The Decision.

The comic also includes a neat feature in the back where both King and Parent count down their own personal top ten Archie stories. They sold me on a couple I haven’t read yet but would now sure like to find.

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