I took my son to Free Comic Book Day this year, and I wanted to drop a few quick reviews of the books I picked up. Here’s the first one.

Archie #1 by Mark Waid and Fiona Staples.

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I really liked this book.

I used to read Archie digests with my friend Paulo when I was in high-school. His older sister must have had seventy or eighty of them, and for a couple of summers I’d go over to his place and we’d each grab a couple to read in his wildly overgrown backyard, under this big maple we called “The Leaning Tree”. It is a good, fuzzy memory of my early teen years, and because of it, I’ve always been partial to Archie comics.

Waid is very good super-hero writer, with a long work history at pretty much every major comics publishing house, and he delivers something that I feel is tough to do with Archie, and makes it fresh and modern. The gang all sound familiar, but at the same time new and interesting, and that made the book fun to read.

Fiona Staples kills it on art. Her work has always been great on Saga, and in many ways it’s even better on Archie. Her characters don’t wear expressions, the emote. They pop at you from the page, and it just swells up and takes you along. It’s really wonderful stuff. Top notch.

So yeah, with equal parts fresh new look and wonderful nostalgia, the team of Waid and Staples have crafted a damned fine Archie comic and I’m pretty sure I’ll be trying to pick up this book to see where it goes.