Come December, Archie will be releasing yet another one of their “New Riverdale” titles, Reggie and Me by Tom DeFalco, Sandy Jarrell, Kelly Fitzpatrick and Jack Morelli. Being a big fan of the line (this week’s Josie and the Pussycats #1 will be at the top of my to be read pile) this theoretically should be a good thing, but for me, there’s a major stumbling block, and it's not the creative team, it's Reggie. Maybe it’s just because I came to appreciate the original Archie oeuvre relatively late in life, but, growing up watching the cartoon The Archie Show, I could never understand why the rest of the Riverdale Gang would want to have anything to do with him.
Which is one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the relatively realistic contemporary Riverdale that writer Mark Waid has engineered in the main Archie title. Unless it was called for by the plot, Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica have nothing to do with Reggie. Just as importantly, Reggie wants nothing to do with them. It seemed like that was going to be the status quo until I picked up Jughead #9 and saw Reggie tagging along with the gang on a trip to Pop Tate's Chocklit Shoppe. Did I miss something?
A while ago, before it was recently confirmed in Jughead #4, I speculated as to whether the publisher would ever address the reason for Jughead’s infamous indifference to girls (see “Confessions of a Comic Book Guy -- The Deal With Jughead”). In that same spirit I have to ask, in all seriousness, “What’s The Deal With Reggie?” I’m admittedly no expert when it comes to old Archie Comics, but I’ve consulted with a few people who are, and as far as they know there’s never been a story that established why Reggie is such a jerk, or why the gang would let him hang around. Hopefully, such a story will be in the offing.
Because in spite of American television's obsessive emphasis on “likable” characters there still has to be conflict, which is why having an “awful character” has become a prerequisite for most series. Someone who can say and do all the horrible things that you would love to do - if there weren’t any consequences. They’re always the outlier of the show’s social group, openly contemptuous of it and its members, but reliant on its support - though they’d never admit it. They’re Invariably smug, selfish, greedy, arrogant, narcissistic, semi-sociopaths; on Community it was Pierce Hawthorne, on Parks and Recreation it was Tom Haverford and on Brooklyn Nine-Nine it’s Gina Linetti. They’re all, well, an awful lot like Reggie actually.
Except for his propensity for practical jokes that is. Growing up, I was invariably the victim, not the perpetrator of, this kind of “joke.” Which I’ll happily admit is another reason why I’m not a Mantle fan; I not only don’t see the humor in them. I know from hard the first-person experience just how cruel and stupid they can be. In the old days, at least, Reggie tended to avoid physically dangerous stunts, but he lived in the world before there was Jackass and Punk’d. With that kind of inspiration, I shudder to think what sort of “mischief” the new look Reggie will be getting himself into.
And speaking of his new look, again, I’m no Archie expert, but I just don’t think the new Reggie looks “Reggie” enough. He’s entirely too generically handsome, without so much as a smirk or a sneer, and someone with the concentrated swinishness possessed by Reggie Mantle really requires much more of what the Germans would call a Backpfeifengesicht - a punchable face. Plus, in two of the 10 (!) variant covers to Reggie and Me #1 he’s shown wearing a white t-shirt and black leather jacket. Reggie may have been a lot of things, but a Greaser isn’t one of them.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
