I'm posting this here and not int he main thread because it's mostly about popular culture in the UASR, and was mostly done for fun. It should be treated as mostly canon, though telescoping this far into the future may result in some discontinuity later.
This of course makes us ask can one write fanfic of something they "own". I think the answer is yes.
I should note that I'm not a huge fan of Archie comics by any means. I've read a few here and there, and absorbed a lot of the rest by osmosis. This was mostly a result of my own fascination with how the series could endure for three quarters of a century, and I decided to use it as a sort of mirror to culture in the Reds! universe. So I've done my homework, but this isn't intended to be an accurate recreation of OTL Archie by any means. I've taken the basic premise and gone off in my own direction based on the fictional history of the UASR.
Cultural Trends in the UASR as Witnessed by Archie Comics
Though the original parent cooperative, the MLJ Collective, had been publishing comics for nearly two years before hand, the December 1941 introduction of the characters Archibald “Archie” Andrews, Elizabeth “Betty” Kubisz(1), and Forsythe “Jughead” Pendleton Jones III would prove to be the watershed moment for the young cooperative.
Along with Veronica Del Valle(2), introduced four months later, the Riverdale gang would quickly become the cooperative’s flagship title, and lend the main character’s name to the company. Archie Comics has been publishing continuously for over 75 years, a long history filled with multiple imprints, numerous reboots, retcons, what-ifs, etc.
Aside from the cast of characters and their basic personalities, there have been few constants in the entire run of Archie Comics. Its continuous self-reinvention has proven the secret to its enduring success. The basic premise follows the life of everyman Archie Andrews’ life in Riverdale Polytechnic school, and his relationships with friends and family. His laid-back best friend, Jughead Jones, is his constant companion. Betty and Veronica are romantic rivals, both seeking to win the often-oblivious Archie’s affections.
1940s
The earliest comics established the basic premise, and there are few obvious early installment bugs that would seem bizarre to readers in later eras. Riverdale is a generic suburb of an unnamed city that is portrayed as an amalgam of many major cities. Archie is the only child of Fred and Mary Andrews. His father is a chemist, and his mother works as a freelance writer.
In his debut comic, Archie tries (and fails) to impress his tomboyish next door neighbor, Betty Kubisz, who initially considers him annoying. Betty is the youngest daughter of Hal and Alice Kubisz. Hal is an ambiguously Jewish army officer, and Alice is a cook at a factory canteen. Around the time Betty starts to get sweet on Archie, Veronica moves to the neighborhood. Veronica is the only child of Hiram and Hermione Del Valle. The Del Valles were a clan of affluent pre-revolution lawyers turned nomenklatura supporters of the new regime. Veronica is somewhat vain and conceited, and her family exhibit a comical form of a lot of old bourgeois affectations.
In the first two years of the run, the ongoing Second World War was never mentioned. The comics existed in looptime, eternally on the eve of war. The backdrop was a time of hope and occasional danger. In 1943, the comics became slightly more somber, the tone beginning to approach dramedy, as the looming war was first referenced in comics. Some plotlines, commissioned by the government’s public relations programs, used preparedness measures as a dramatic or comedic backdrop. A memorable story line occurred on a Pioneer League field trip. Archie’s enrolling in the youth group prompts both Betty and Veronica to join to get close to him. The co-ed trip is filled with hijinks, including some boundary pushing references to teenage sexuality. The paramilitary nature of the early Pioneer League, and the blatantly militaristic maneuvers that the Riverdale crew participate in are somewhat shocking to modern viewers, but uncontroversial in its era.
The looming prospect of conscription increased dramatic tension for the rest of the war years. Though the writers occasionally debated taking the characters in that direction, it was ultimately decided to keep Archie in the loop time of a perpetual polytechnic. This scenario would be explored decades later in the elseworld comic line G.I. Archie.
Following demobilization, Archie Comics adopted a more light-hearted tone. The editorial line became one of avoiding any heavy or controversial real world topics. Archie’s political content was reduced to the standard genuflections typical of contemporary society, invisible to Americans but highly charged in foreign markets.
The comic had become popular in Great Britain, France, and Canada, as well as Mexico and the Soviet Union during the war. Changing global political situations in the late 1940s resulted in official censorship and commonly, the withdrawal from many newsstands.
Archie Comics received its first adaptation in 1946, a radio program carried by the cooperative Mutual Broadcasting System until 1955. The program was typical of the era; the characters were voiced by twenty-something professional actors. Everyone spoke in immaculate Transatlantic accents, the kind that was standard among all professional politicians, news broadcasters, film reels, movies, and used a homogenizing cultural force in the military and polytechnics across the country.(3)
1950s
The 50s were an era of slow metamorphosis in Archie Comics. The brand expanded from comic books to a daily newspaper strip in 1951, which would be syndicated in newspapers across the country for decades to come. The main monthly comic and the newspaper strip would exist in a loosely shared continuity throughout the decade. Fan lore explaining the various inconsistencies is dense almost to the point of incomprehensible.
Two monthly comic spin-offs would also launch, Archie’s Pal Jughead, and Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica. All three comics were under the tight editorial control of the Archie Comics Central Committee, which planned out story arcs with writers and worked to prevent discontinuity.
The Jughead series put the series darkhorse Jughead in the spotlight. It was a slightly more mature series, aimed at college aged youths as well as polytechniks(4). Jughead’s quirkiness evolves into the quintessential beatnik persona, and much of the story and comedy are driven by Jughead’s existentialist musings on life.
Betty and Veronica focused on the two’s frenemy relationship. The love triangle with Archie was put more in focus, but the two competing versions of femininity also strived against one another in sports, school, part-time jobs.
Betty and Veronica’s relationship became less venomous in the 50s. No longer irascible foes for Archie’s attention, the two enjoyed a somewhat affable relationship as worthy rivals. Common plots included devil’s pacts to defeat a third-party interloper, good natured sabotage of one another, and direct competition in sports and scholastics. One of the pair would take up a new sport/hobby etc., and thereby compel the other to join in as well to test themselves against one another.
Evolving standards of decency changed the tone of the comics significantly. By the end of the 50s, the series had inched towards a more realistic portrayal of teenage relationships. Archie dated both Betty and Veronica in plot lines in the late 50s. Certain comics caused controversy by depicting “necking”, the portrayal of teenage party games like “spin the bottle,” or the use of joking references to sex acts. The most famous incident, immortalized by references in other media, occurred in a January 1959 issue of Archie. Archie had inadvertently agreed to a date with both Betty and Veronica on the same day. Both dates begin flirting towards the idea of “going steady”, while Archie tries to juggle both dates and keep Betty and Veronica’s paths from crossing. After a series of hijinks, the ruse is revealed, and both Betty and Veronica are deeply hurt by his duplicity, which had begun innocently enough (not wanting to disappoint either of them). After commiserating his problems with Jughead, Jughead observes that he would not have this constant romantic problem if he had been honest, stopped stringing along his number two choice Betty, and just told Veronica how he felt rather than hemming and hawing for the past twelve issues (a fourth wall breaking reference). Archie scoffs and tells Jughead to “blow me.”
By the mid 50s, the standard of loop time was thoroughly entrenched. The leather jackets, goggles, flying caps and jackboots of the older dieselpunk aesthetic had given way to the relaxed 50s youth culture of blue jean jackets, flowery skirts and bandanas. Jughead’s “whoopee hat”, once a common affectation of schoolboys, was alone immune to the changes.
1960s
The Archie editorial committee made the controversial decision to allow the timeline to crawl forward. In an era where a large number of youths were now going to some form of higher education, the comic’s focus on the idyll of polytechnic was becoming quaint. In July 1961, the “Archie Graduates” plotline began. In the build-up to graduation, running over two years of comics, Archie goes steady with Veronica. The two are implied to have lost their virginities to one another, but there is no direct reference to this. In grief, Betty cuts her hair short, takes up the guitar, and joins a garage band with Archie’s rival Reggie Mantle and series newcomer Chuck Clayton. Jughead surprises everyone by being the class valedictorian, and gives a memorable address to put a capstone on the series’ polytechnic years. The syndicated newspaper comic would diverge, continuing to focus on the gang’s life at Riverdale Polytechnic.
In the following arc, the three main series and the new Reggie Mantle comic followed the gang mustering out to Armed Masses Militia service. The portrayal received mixed reviews at the time, with some critics lambasting it for depicting the Militia as “polytechnic with guns and sex”. It was, however, not far from the truth, and new writers such as Abbie Hoffman and Leah Kline* drawing from their own personal experience with conscription in the late 50s.
Somewhat implausibly, most of the main cast from Riverdale are grouped in the same brigade, the fictional 13th Militia Brigade, clustered in the same company. The experience of living and working together in the barracks changed the main cast’s dynamic. Parental influences were greatly reduced, and the main characters started to show a previously unthinkable level of introspection (i.e., any at all). Veronica’s privileged background, which in the original runs had been somewhat anachronistically led to fawning behavior from others, had now become a liability. She faced hazing from her fellows, portrayed in a mean-spirited by not overly threatening way. Her relationship with Archie ended soon after basic.
Betty became somewhat more macho, and she proved to be in her element in the military. Her athletic qualities came to the forefront of her character. Meanwhile, Jughead proves to be a constant thorn in the side of instructors and officers, and Archie’s passion for cars gets developed. His indecisive nature takes on a more dramatic quality in the complicated relationship between him, Betty, and Veronica.
Some mid 60s stories created moral panic through the depiction of non-sexual nudity. The controversy, which drew battlelines between the more old-fashioned and libertines, grew large enough for Premier Richard Nixon to make a jocular comment about it at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. Aside from the fading influence of bourgeois body-shame, the comic did devote some time to some serious issues, though not, as rumor had it, at the behest of any government agency. Plotlines dealing with intimate partner abuse, drug addiction, and social responsibility were notable additions.
By 1968, “Zouave Archie”(5) had played out. It had given the comic a number of other firsts, including the first use of the word “fuck”, when Betty referred to the infamous “Ham and Lima Beans” C-Ration meal unit by its nickname “Ham and Motherfuckers”. The flamboyant use of 60s fashion, including men growing their hair out, and the infusion of Chinese, Mexican and Native American cultural influences. The next major phase in the comic would come with a splintering of the main characters.
1970s
In 1969, Archie Comics would remake itself. Bob Montana would retire as chairman of the Archie Collective. The relatively young Vasili Pound* would take over, and chart the comics in a new direction.
Vasili Pound was born in Omsk in July 1941, the son of Lorne Pound, an American engineer, and Zorja Livovna Sokolov, a Russian ballerina and journalist. With somewhat of a wunderkind reputation, having already published several novels as well as his well-received contributions to the Archie brand, Pound’s rise signaled the changing of the guard in the collective.
The Archie Collective was in financial distress thanks to declining sales in the flagship line, as well as poor critical reception to non-Archieverse properties. While some in the committee had wanted to reboot the comic, following the lead of successful reboots of several superhero properties, Pound successfully lobbied for more contiguous re-imagination.
In its near three decades of running, the flagship series had accreted a large crop of characters and a somewhat convoluted lore that was difficult for new readers to get into. While the reprint of old comics in anthology format helped bring in new revenue, it wouldn’t save the brand alone. The “Archie goes to University” arc would simultaneously return the comic to its roots while continuing to push the story forward.
Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica would be living under a single roof, in a student apartment in Brooklyn. While Jughead would pursue the Platonic ideal of the hamburger working for a local co-op, Archie, Betty and Veronica would enroll in the Republican University of Metropolis (RUM).
Archie, as captivated with space travel as most of his audience, would enroll in the aerospace engineering program. Betty reconnected with her old passion by pursing a music degree. Veronica was originally undeclared, but would eventually settle on economics.
At RUM, the old antics of live triangles continued in a more mature form. New side characters were introduced, and old favorites would occasionally pop in for a visit. Rapidly shifting proletarian culture bubbled up in the new stories. A June 1971 issue featured the first on-screen depiction of sex, a one night stand between Betty and a classmate, orchestrated to make Archie jealous.
The college years featured a return of political content, though now in a satirical manner. The farcical nature of campus politics was a common comedic source. Archie gets delusions of grandeur when he runs for the campus soviet, only to find his life choked by bureaucracy and moonbattery from fellow party members (never named, but implied to be the Student Post-Scarcity Society, a standard bearer of the late 60s and 70s student movement). Veronica grapples with the excesses of 70s campus feminism: her speech bubbles start filling with “womyn”, and she flirts with political lesbianism before chickening out. Betty falls in with a collective of avant-garde artists who produce very little art but ruthlessly tear down any perception of “conventionality”.
While magnified from its source material, 70s Archie did reflect some of the disjunctive trends of what would later be called the Second Cultural Revolution. As the characters aged and became a bit wiser, the moonbattery died down. Jughead remained the voice of reason, and helped his friends through their trying personal issues.
By the mid 70s, the love triangle, long out of focus, returned to the center of drama and comedy. A famous January 1976 issue featured a cover where Jughead, who rarely loses his temper, angrily chastising Archie for being indecisive.
1980s
Now four decades old, the flagship comics had covered just shy of ten years of the character’s lives. Now almost 24 and preparing to graduate, Archie’s love triangle would be reaching its resolution. But the comic itself was feeling its age. Many writers, even the previous era’s champion Vasili Pound, were contemplating a return to form.
In one of the most controversial decisions in comics history, the central committee decided to tie off the love triangle permanently as a final swan song for “Old Archie”, a decision that still inspires internet backdraft in 2017. In a soap opera-esque story running across Archie and Betty and Veronica (and occasionally spilling over into Jughead), Archie chooses the feminine rich girl Veronica over the tomboy Betty. There is no graceful reveal; Betty walks in the couple, and sees Archie on bended knee in front of Veronica.
The December 1981 epilogue depicts a short scene of a polytechnic reunion. The surrealist re-union is attended by multiple versions of each character, each from a different historical era. The meta-commentary on the series did very little to sooth ruffled feathers.
The flagship would go largely dormant for a couple of years. Jughead would continue free of the drama of the love triangle in this time. The Archie Collective would gather its creative energies, and make a number of new forays into action and mystery comics with unrelated characters.
The first elseworlds comic, GI Archie, began publishing in May 1982, riding a wave of new WW2 themed movies, TV shows and historical fiction. Tonally, it was somewhat akin to the 1940s pulp comics. It was low on grit, high on MacGuyver-esque antics, though without the outright demonization and racism that often was an undercurrent in the historical comics.
Archie Comics would return to form in 1984. The reboot would put the crew back in Riverdale Polytechnic in a contemporary setting. To promote the reboot, the collective would invite talented new artists and writers, including one each from Japan and the Soviet Union (where the comics had proven almost as resolutely popular as in the home country). And as the cherry on top, a primetime animated series was developed, targeted for the same launch date as Riverdale.
The animated series and new comic had undergone a stylistic evolution, incorporating influences from Japanese and Soviet pop art styles. Compared to the sarcastic and occasionally dour 70s, the 80s were an exuberant, optimistic period. The cultural mélange of big hair, acid-washed jeans, retro-dieselpunk, and loud music was captured in a somewhat exaggerated fashion.
The animated series ran for three seasons. The comics ran parallel, covering the same plots with some occasional minor differences in characterization. The animation was well received for its voice acting and score, which incorporated a mixture of contemporary pop music, pop tunes written for the series, and instrumental tracks. The show sampled the who’s-who of 80s voice acting talent. The reimagined background for Veronica, daughter of the well-connected Party nomenklatura, retained the elegant Transatlantic accent. Betty, now a first-generation Czech immigrant, was portrayed by Czech teen actress Barbora Kodetová. Archie himself spoke in the practically regionless patter of daytime TV, often described as a kid from Iowa trying and failing to do a proper theater accent.
The New Archie proved to be an explosive hit. Several parallel comics were launched, continuing the dynamic of focusing on the characters of the love triangle, and the ever-popular Jughead. New Jughead would run in double issues with the still popular old Jughead, the last holdover from the pre-reboot universe.
The new Archie broke new ground. The inclusion of openly gay and lesbian characters among the main cast, an increased emphasis on racial diversity, and a Franco-British exchange student, Jean-Pierre Cromwell, were well received. While some critics noted that the refusal to tackle issues like racism or homophobia were serious omissions, others applauded the hopeful nature of Riverdale, where race, sex, or orientation were treated as uncontroversial, and diversity was accepted.
New Archie’s biggest surprises came with how it handled its core love triangle dynamic. The final arc of the animation’s third season focused heavily on Betty and Veronica’s frenemy relationship. While some reviewers had noted the undercurrent of belligerent sexual tension between the two, the finale’s slap-slap-kiss-kiss moment surprised most viewers.
The ramifications of cutting Archie out of the love triangle were more fully explored in the ongoing comics. Archie’s reaction was mostly treated for comedy, with gags about going into withdrawals from the lack of attention or conflict over him. Betty and Veronica would date for over a year in the comics before breaking it off, their youthful wills sabotaging their relationship.
1990s
If the 80s were a party, the 90s was the hair-of-the-dog. The optimistic hope that the Cold War would soon be peacefully won was under assault. The utopianism the previous decades Ecological Revolution was turning out to be much slower and more difficult in practice. The development of space had inched forward, leaving the old dreams of space colonization by the year 2000 in serious doubt. And even cultural change was encountering new forces of resistance.
Archie Comics continued the basic formula from the 80s with some new wrinkles. Jughead, often aloof to questions of romance, was pretty much confirmed asexual. Betty and Veronica continued their conflict over Archie’s affections while dealing with their own attraction to one another.
Content-wise, the comics had put themselves firmly in the teen sex comedy genre, with bawdy content interspersed with the misadventures of hormonal teenagers. Nonetheless, dramatic story lines remained in the canon, including Archie’s parent’s looming divorce, Reggie Mantle’s older brother being diagnosed with AIDs, and Jean-Pierre’s feelings of cultural alienation living in America.
Archie comics published a number of short-running elsewords comics outside the main canon. This included crossovers with popular media, such as the series Archie ½, a crossover with the martial arts genderbending action/sex comedy Ranma ½. Both series were well known for their love dodecahedrons, and the result was turned into an ongoing series after the latter’s conclusion. Other notable crossovers include Archie: First Blood Part XVIII, a parody of the long-running First Blood action movie series, Archie Andrews of Mars, a pastiche of the popular Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series, and Archie Who, a Doctor Who crossover penned by legendary Whovian Matthew Jacobs.
Other elsewords were based off fantastic dream sequences that occurred in the animation or comic in the 80s or 90s, such as Archibald Andrews Esquire, where Archie is a Scottish nobleman’s son in the Regency era, or Archie Andrews: Space Marine, which is exactly what it says on the tin.
In the main series, Archie remained in perpetual polytechnic stasis. Fashion and cultural references changed, but none of the main cast were any closer to graduation by the end of the 90s. Old Archie received a revival comic, Archibald, which continued the plotline of Old Archie ten years later. This Archie is married and has two kids with Veronica. He’s a successful engineer, and works on the iconic Starclipper shuttle(6). Veronica is an elite civil rights attorney working with the Southron Proletarian Law Center. Betty is a heavy metal guitarist who’s made it big critically and popularly. The three have recently returned to Riverdale, and reconnected with one another and Jughead, who now teaches philosophy at Riverdale Polytechnic.
Archibald took a more mature sitcom approach, intended to resonate with readers of Old Archie. Dramatic themes of family, home and identity were at the forefront. Archie is torn between his career and wanting to be close to his parents in their twilight years. Veronica tries to mend fences with her father, who never approved of her relationship with Archie. Betty identifies as a lesbian, but still pines a bit for Archie. Nonetheless, her relationship with Veronica is friendly, though some of the old cattiness sometimes comes out.
Archibald culminated in 1999, with the love-triangle resolved in a new way. After enduring mounting romantic tension, Betty and Veronica narrowly avoid having an affair. When they confess this to Archie, they talk through the issue. In the final issue, they form a ménage a trois relationship. To their mortification, Archie’s teenage eldest son Forsythe catches the trio in flagrante delicto, having returned a day early from a road trip with friends to find them fooling around in the living room. Forsythe, completely unfazed, congratulates them for working out their deep-seated issues, and excuses himself.
2000s
The 2000s opened with a new animated Archie series, in a separate continuity from the long-running comics. The new animated series played with some of the basics of the series while remaining true to formula. The series reimagined the love triangle. Archie and Bettie, old childhood friends, were now thrust into heated rivalry for the affections of transfer student Veronica.
The show dealt with the Kinsey Scale in a playful manner. Veronica, whose fashionista regality was cranked up to eleven, explicitly states she’s a 3 (equal opportunity bisexual) on the scale in the series pilot. Archie flutters between a 1 and a 2, and deals with some level of confusion over attraction to other men. Betty, now a chapstick lesbian athlete and tinkerer, thinks about experimenting with men on occasion.
The series reimagined iconic plotlines from past Archies in this new framework. After getting off to a rocky start, it won a strong following both domestically as well as in foreign localizations in Japan, China, Germany and the Soviet Union.
By contrast, the comic series was in trouble. Editorial control had become arthritic and stifling, and the perpetual stasis was starting to wear out. The inclusion of increasingly fantastic elements to keep things interesting while still not resolving basic character arcs or even letting the characters graduate, was highly controversial. While the Time Police Arc was fun on its own merits, Shanghaiing the Riverdale gang in the future, and watching them hop through timelines to get home was out of schema to the series.
The gimmicks couldn’t sustain the comic, and by 2009, the decision was made to reboot the comic again.
2010s
The Reboot Arc, jocularly referred to by fans as Crisis on Infinite Archies, took the fantastical elements to their final conclusion. A sprawling arc, incorporating characters and settings from all the various Archie continuities, including elseworlds, as well as nods to popular science fiction and fantasy series, played out over web and print comics.
The various continuities are revealed to be a series of simulated realities in the endless mind of a matrioshka brain. All anachronisms are explained by subtle archiving and rebooting of simulations. Archie Prime, the original 1940s era Archie, succeeds in convincing the Overman, the immense posthuman intelligence residing in the matrioshka brain, to give them something real. While the Overman is revolted by the possibility of real, permanent suffering, it relents in the end.
The series reboot started six months after the conclusion of Crisis on Infinite Archies. The new comic, done in a manga style reminiscent of popular 90s animes like Nadia of the Mysterious Seas, re-establish the basic premise by drawing heavily on the original 40s comics as well as the early-2000s animated series.
(1) Archie creator Bob Montana named Betty for a former girlfriend, Czech immigrant Betty Tokar Jankovich. ITTL, she also has Czech origins.
(2) Veronica Lodge is named Del Valle IOTL Spanish language versions. ITTL, her familial ancestry is Castillan Spanish.
(3) One thing that is often paradoxical about revolutions is the mass appropriation of “high culture.” During the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the wearing of powdered wigs was in decline in the aristocratic Great Britain. But in Revolutionary France, the abolition of sumptuary laws and material levelling resulted in people of all social classes adopting powdered wigs, thereby destroying their aristocratic connotation. In the UASR, the regionless “Transatlantic accent”, originally an affectation of prep school trained elites and theater actors in deliberate imitation of British Received Pronunciation, is re-appropriated as a sort of common “formal dialect” used by people regardless of social class.
(4) Someone who goes to a polytechnic. Compare “high schooler”. The -nik suffix entered English from Yiddish, and is roughly equivalent to -er. In this case, it is deliberately punny.
(5) Zouave is a somewhat mocking nickname for members of the Armed Masses Militia, referring to how proud new recruits tend to be at their dowdy uniforms (a right of passage to adulthood), as though they were a foppish old-fashioned Zouave rifleman. It’s not as mocking as “weekend warrior” is in IOTL, it’s a bit more comparable to “grunt”.
(6) It’s the fully reusable Lockheed Shuttle LS A.
