Tue Sep 29, 2009 — by Mike Gold

Robot Chicken Goes Jughead

Probably Won't Need To Be Bleeped, Though

Archie Comics is perhaps the most innovative publisher around these days, although for many comics fans they’re beneath the radar. That’s a shame; folks are missing out on some great stuff.

Some fans are aware of their New Look digest books (“Ultimate Archie”?), and Mike Uslan’s Marriage of Archie and Veronica has made headlines. For me, well, I’m looking forward to their upcoming crossover with the 1950s/60s Archie Comics characters: Cosmo the Merry Martian, Super Duck, Seymour and friends. But the stunt they’ve just announced is the most provocative one yet.

Tom Root, co-head writer/ co-producer of Robot Chicken and co-creator/executive producer of Adult Swim’s new Titan Maximum parody series, is writing the 200th issue of Jughead. Yeah, that’s volume two of Jughead; you know how comic book numbering goes these days.

Both Robot Chicken and Titan Maximum are, to put it politely, hardly family fare… unless your family has the name “Manson” in it. The Adult Swim broadcasts are heavily bleeped – the DVD releases are not – and they tend to be quite violent and, dare I say it, irreverent. Oh, and extremely funny. Which probably tells you more about me than you wanted to know.

The story, “Something Ventured, Something Gained,” starts out with Jughead trading his, ahh, metabolism to a witch for a mega-cheeseburger. Bizarre wackiness ensues: Archie tries to cut a deal to trade the witch his awesome wholesomeness to restore his best friend to normalcy, Betty and Veronica try to cut a deal to restore Archie’s purity, and so on. All the while, Jughead actually gains weight!

It probably would have been easier for the Riverdale crew to just drop a dime on Sabrina, but hey, count me in! After all the mindless, in-perpetuity crossover events from DC and Marvel, I can use a self-contained book-lengther!

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