Archie #1 2015
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“Fiona was our first choice,” Goldwater says. “If she said ‘Yes,’ there was going to be no conversations with anybody else. We were so lucky she said ‘Yes.’”
To create Archie #1, Staples teamed up with writer Mark Waid, known for his work on such titles as Superman and The Flash for DC and Marvel Comics. Riverdale High, as reimagined by Staples and Waid, seems a fairly good mirror of a public high school in a middle-income neighborhood. The student body is ethnically diverse, one character is handicapped, and almost everyone is glued to smartphones.
Representing today’s tech-centric world through writing was a struggle for Waid. The old Betty and Veronica characters bonded over trips to the mall or days at the beach. Today, characters are Instagramming and texting. “Kids don’t socialize the same way they did 20, 30 years ago,” says Waid. “Kids socialize almost exclusively on social media. That’s antithetical to [visual] drama.”
Staples drew cell phones and video-game remotes in the hands of the characters, and Waid filled in text bubbles and other visual cues that let readers know what is happening on characters’ screens.