Having attracted much attention and some controversy prior to its release, Archie 636’s “The Big Switcheroo!” turns out to be a gentle screwball comedy reminiscent of Thorne Smith’s whimsical supernatural romances of the 1930s.
Put it this way; how would our American chums feel if a British writer depicted a tour group in 2008′s New York, using subway tokens (obsolete since 2003) to go to visit the twin towers of the World Trade Centre (famously destroyed in 2001)? I daresay they’d be miffed.
Alex Simmons is in the wrong job. Judging from the evidence in these two issues, he could make a lot of money as a spin doctor for America’s Republican Party.
This themed issue looks at four successive April Fools’ Days in the life of Riverdale High’s premier prankster, Reggie Mantle. Each story is by a different artist/writer combo, each a little different from the Archie ‘house style’ – retaining enough of the characteristic flourishes so that the characters remain on-model, but still giving a slightly different flavour to each tale.
These two oversize hardbacks reprint material from various Archie titles each concentrating on the work of a single artist. The reproduction is excellent and the colouring, based on the original guides, very sympathetic to the glossy paper.
This is a handsome hardback, with good reproduction, containing reprints of early Archie stories; a precursor to an already announced series of Archive volumes collecting Archie strips chronologically.