The most recent story arc has taken the girls from what is the most common denominator for all Archie characters – the fictional town of Riverdale.  Betty and Veronica have been sent to explore the world on exchange and exchange students have been sent to Riverdale in their place.  It is a simple enough concept, but surprisingly a pretty novel one for the residents of Riverdale who seem to live inside their own world without interacting with the outside (other than having some aspects of the outside coming in.)

While this seemed like a pretty fun idea to start with, the story arc is becoming overly convoluted in its storytelling.  Betty and Veronica have previously decided that the experiences which they are having are not as otherworldly as they had hoped, and so therefore decide to switch identities as they arrive to India.  This leads to a sequence of extraordinary occurrences for the two of them, or at least extraordinary in that they are living through each other’s eyes.  At the meantime back in Riverdale, their absence is not felt as much as Veronica stand-in Violette (from France) and Betty stand-in Banni (from India) have the same same influence on the boys as the originals did.  Meanwhile Archie works odd jobs around the neighborhood in order to be able to afford a trip to India to bring the girls back (which is a bit unrealistic considering how many lawns he would have to mow for that much money.)

While the issue holds together pretty well, it also has a lot of missed opportunity.  Instead of all the plot twists, the creative team could have just focused on the travel aspect of the story, and made it compelling enough without having to keep Archie relevant in the title (this is after all the girls’ book.)  Equally the switching of identities is fun enough, but they are already in India, and there are enough stories to be told there anyway without having to replay the Prince and the Pauper.  It is more the missed potential which drags this story down a bit as it still reads well enough, but the creative team would have been better to follow the lead of their own characters, and to stay our of Riverdale for a while.

Story: Michael Uslan Art: Dan Parent
Story: 7.7 Art: 8.0 Overall: 7.7 Recommendation: Read

Archie Comics provided Graphic Policy with a free copy for review