Thread by @Comrade_Bullski

Alright my friends it is time we wrap up our journey. Today I will cover the final decade of the Archie/MLJ superheroes until we catch up to the present. It's been an interesting decade for these beleaguered heroes and I can't wait to finally talk about it.

It's been a journey since that first issue of Pep Comics back in 1940. When last we saw our heroes they had enjoyed a not terribly successful second stint over at DC comics which ended after less than a year of publication in 2011.

With the rights immediately reverting back to Archie, a long-dormant project of former editor now publisher Mike Pellerito was roused from its slumber. Pellerito and editor Paul Kaminski collaborated on an idea to relaunch the Archie super-heroes as an accessible, all-ages line.

To perhaps everybody's surprise, Archie's Sonic comic was still going, having outlasted three eras of the Crusaders, and so Pellerito and Kaminski looked to the Archie titles to find creators to handle the flagship title of their new launch.

The first was artist Ben Bates, one of the most popular Archie Sonic artists. His cartoony yet solid style on Sonic and Archie's Mega Man seemed very fitting for a superhero title, and Bates quickly designed new versions of the storied superheroes, updating them for the 2010s.

The writer would be none other than Ian Flynn himself, once a fan who rose to become a writer for the Sonic comic virtually overnight and managed to rescue the title from poor sales and failing readership. Flynn took to working with the pitch for the new title with gusto.

This investment in superheroes was also connected to Archie's big online expansion into an app reader and accessible digital downloads for smartphones. The "Red Circle" banner was once more revived to brand these titles and also had their own dedicated app hosted by Archie.

The Red Circle app hosted most of the classic library of Archie superhero stories though not bulk of the golden age MLJ ones (unsurprising given their violent and often dated nature) but was advertised as a good and cheap way to catch up with the Archie heroes.

In late 2012 the first new comics of the reinvigorated Red Circle were available digitally, with the flagship being Ian Flynn and Ben Bates' New Crusaders. First available as a series of short chapters, the series was released physically and also had a trade release.

Written and drawn to be accessible and fun, the first issue opens with a now greying Joe Higgins arriving at the newly invented town of Red Circle for a reunion with some old friends.

Some reunion, too! I'm sure by now you can probably tell who all these guys are even without the helpful footnotes later. Note the absence of Thomas Troy and Lancelot Strong, excluded due to the co-ownership by the Joe Simon estate. Fly-Girl serves as Troy's replacement.

New Crusaders is intentionally vague about continuity. Many past comics are referenced outright or indirectly, implying most of the golden, silver and bronze age series did actually happen in this canon, but not in any specific time frame.

As a result of this rather DCAU approach we can have characters of different eras as contemporaries while also ensuring they are old enough to all have kids. And the kids are a rather quirky and odd bunch, perhaps unsurprisingly.

Of course something has to go wrong, and that something is the return of the Crusaders arch-foe the Brain Emperor, deadlier and more sadistic than ever. While Joe takes the children to safety in his underground bunker, the older Crusaders engage the Emperor in desperate battle...

The battle levels most of Red Circle and ends with the Emperor triumphant. The Crusaders are dead.

Joe Higgins is rather interesting in this series. He's so driven by his long experience that he almost immediately latches onto a backup plan to train the kids as the next generation of Crusaders, which does not go over well with most of them.

The series is peppered with cameos from other Archie characters like Bob Phantom who is revealed to run a space surveillance post and helps Kelly brand embrace her new Fly Girl role.

While this generation are clearly legacies to their parents and guardians their powers often come from other sources, like the Jaguar's young ward Ivette being given a helmet containing the spirit of a bloodthirsty Mayan god which Ralph Hardy never used.

The Brain Emperor meanwhile raids a prison that holds most of the supervillain enemies of the Crusaders including the Eliminators from the bronze age, one-time Shield foe Flaky Puff (now called the Identity Thief) and... the Eraser. Not doing so hot.

With the team finally powered they decide to take the battle to Brain Emperor and stop his jailbreak.

Surprisingly, they get some help from the Hangman, Black Hood an Deadly Force, all of whom were also imprisoned for past crimes. Not the cute Z.I.P tags referencing Zip comics.

So what happens? I'm not going to tell you because I want you to read this series. It's fun, easy to get into and has a charming cast of characters with enough connections to the past to feel like a true sequel and not just a new universe.

To me New Crusaders is how you do a soft reboot. It takes the elements from the past that works, ditches what didn't and builds up a team of likeable, interesting characters with a good dynamic.

As a companion piece to this series Archie released a special trade collection called New Crusaders Legacy which reprinted a number of older stories about the original Crusader characters.

The trade has the very vaguest of framing stories but is notable for giving us this little tidbit about the Fly. I would assume it was okay to use him here since he only appears in reprint material.

In 2013 Archie launched a second Red Circle book from celebrated indie comics creator Dean Haspiel, well-known from comics like the excellent Red Hook. he was aided and abetted by Mark Waid to launch a new series about Archie's most surprising superhero hit.

The Fox was a five-issue series about the self-proclaimed "freak magnet" superhero Paul Patton and his trouble with both family life and a never-ending deluge of strange allies, enemies and general weirdness. And it's great, you should absolutely read it!

I am going to spoiler even less about the Fox but it features some amazingly obscure characters like the golden age Queen of Diamonds, originally from a thinly veiled Flash Gordon imitation strip as well as the Druid from the bronze age Crusaders.

It also features our very own favorite Archie superhero - BOB PHANTOM. And any comic with Bob Phantom in it is automatically a 10/10.

Now unfortunately despite this fantastic start, the Red Circle almost immediately stumbled. The sequel series to Rise of the Heroes called Dark Tomorrow never got a physical release, instead only releasing as a digital exclusive special.

You see, something was happening at the house of Archie around the time the first Red Circle titles launched. They started taking risks and publishing weird, macabre and dark comics featuring their iconic characters, something that never would have happened two decades prior.

Archie was no longer the always all-ages never-ending town of Riverdale but now also had chilling supernatural adventures, zombie apocalypses and alternate futures where the characters were grown up and settled down. Archie had changed.

And it was with titles like this that Archie finally broke through to gain rave reviews from many comics sites which encouraged them to take even more chances and expand the range of titles. The new leadership had instituted a sea change.

With a waning of "traditional" Archie titles there were still of course references to the Archie superheroes in various titles such as Archie #655's "Good Guys of the Galaxy" by Tom DeFalco and Fernando Ruiz. Gee I wonder what kinda movie this might be parodying huh

This story for whatever reason has Cat Girl from the silver age Fly and Jaguar comics as a space heroine on Archie's team. back to her original blonde look too it seems!

Oh yeah and Giant Turtle Boy Archie. I guess it's just something that happens to redheads.

The outcome of this new proliferation of darker Archie titles resulted in a reworking of the Red Circle concept into... the Dark Circle. With the new logo came a new approach which was no longer to provide all-ages superhero adventures but instead go more realistic and grim.

The aforementioned Dark Tomorrow special is not as dark as it may sound despite the new branding. Unfortunately it gives us no closure on the Brain Emperor story from Rise of the Heroes, instead picking up a short while later.

With Flynn still writing and Alitha Martinez on art Dark Tomorrow is a bit more focused on the issues of the characters and their insecurity in their new roles, and the art is decidedly more "realistic" aiming more towards a modern superhero look.

It's a quite readable one-shot story which gives some more depth on several of the characters but ultimately it feels a bit disjointed from the previous series.

Alongside Dark Tomorrow 2015 also saw the digital-only release of another former Red Circle project in the form of Mighty Crusaders: The Lost Crusade, an anthology special where different creative teams got to tackle their superhero of choice.

This special actually has some absolutely vital backstory information like what exactly happened between the Brain Emperor and Mr Justice prior to Rise of the Heroes and the... rather sad fate of Darkling.

Flynn also uses the framing story with the adult kid sidekicks Roy and Dusty discussing the past to tie up a bunch of loose ends from previous runs, especially the bronze age stories. Turns out the Brain Emperor was behind everything!

Nice reference to the Comet 1980s series too, which is apparently still in semi-canon. Some parts of it, I mean. Thelma Dickering is younger and married to Comet here and Hangman is not dead so I guess maybe the second issue isn't. The first issue was even included in the reprint

Overall Lost Crusade is an enjoyable if a bit scattered release. Some nice stories and art but some of them feel like summaries for comics I would rather have seen fully done. We get a DeFalco/Frenz reunion on a Shield story though.

But none of these titles have really embraced the new "Dark Circle" direction. The first ACTUAL Dark Circle comic was Black Hood #1 with a cover-date of April 2015 done by Duane Swierczynski with art by Michael Gaydos. This title is emblematic of this era.

This Black Hood is a purely non-superhero title where Philadelphia cop Gregory Hettinger shoots and kills the Burland Black Hood to death but is disfigured and slowly slips into an ever more violent and psychotic spiral of vigilante activity.

This is NOT a comic to give to your kid or even sensitive readers, folks. It has lots of f-bombs, graphic deaths, gritty and often stereotypical depictions of gang violence and generally reads like a TV show adaptation of a comic.

The first series ran for ten issues with a "Season two" (see what I said about TV?) following in 2016. We even had an issue where Rick Burchett reprised art duties, a welcome addition since I loved his Impact version.

While the first Black Hood series was running we also got the Dark Circle version of the Hangman done by the creative team of Frank Tieri and Felix Ruiz. Once again this is NOT a comic for the young 'uns!

This series melds some of the ideas from the 2010 DC Hangman into the classic hangman mythos making the role a supernatural legacy (kinda like the Impact Black Hood) with each Hangman serving until they find redemption.

The five-issue series followed the latest Hangman, a gangster killed by the previous version of the vigilante and his quest to bring grisly death to the wicked and send their souls to hell. Yeah, remember when Archie canceled Spectrum Comics pre-emptively?

The Dark Circle iteration of the shield from writers Adam Christopher and Chuck Wendig and artist Drew Johnson was a break from the gloomy and nihilistic style of the previous two titles as it assumed more of a modern action movie style.

The series follows a mysterious woman named Victoria Adams who has flashbacks to previous lives where she fought for liberty and freedom and her gradual awakening to her legacy as the original Shield.

Like the Hangman it only lasted four issues of which most is setup, but this version of the Shield was interesting. It feels heavily influenced by MCU movies and the adaptation of the "Winter Soldier" storyline in particular, which isn't a bad thing.

To everybody's surprise there was also a Dark Circle series for the Fox, still done by Haspiel who was astonished that he wasn't asked to gritty-fy his weird superhero antics up. Instead "Fox Hunt" which ran for five issues is another fantastic Fox outing.

This time a whole gaggle of Archie supervillains are after our poor hero and it's more Haspiel goodness all the way. Get this, read it. The Dark Circle cover logo is just for show, this is pure fun.

I have been deliberately saving the Dark Circle version of the Crusaders (once more titled simply "Mighty Crusaders") since it represents the final tie to the New Crusaders established 3 years prior. Flynn returns to writing with interesting art by Kelsey Shannon.

Unfortunately this series purposely time skips past a number of VERY important events. As you saw by in Dark Tomorrow the Brain Emperor storyline was still going, but here he's been soundly defeated in a climactic final battle, with the fate of many characters uncertain.

We now have the Victoria Adams Shield leading the team with Joe Higgins crippled from the unseen conflicts and even more gruff about it.

The series also features the surprise return of the original Steel Sterling and... Darkling? Yep she's recovered and is now spookier than ever.

In the meager four issues of this series that came out the team clash with the Eliminators once more while trying to deal with their new unstable team dynamic.

Meanwhile the Druid (that guy is everywhere!) resurrects Eterno the Conqueror... or is it Eternos? Unfortunately nothing ever comes of this story arc due to the abrupt cancellation of the title.

Much like the Fox and previous New Crusaders releases this book doesn't really embrace the "Dark Circle" aesthetic at all, still aiming at pretty regular styled superheroics even if there is a bit of a focus on the angst of the characters here.

The series ends in the middle of the story with this nice tribute to all the previous iterations of the Crusaders (even the Impact ones!).

2015 saw one more important comic which was as far from the Dark Circle as possible in the form of the two-issue limited series Archie's Superteens versus Crusaders done by Ian Flynn, Gary Martin, David Williams and Kelsey Shannon.

This series is much more in tone with the Archie's Weird Mysteries crossovers we covered last thread. Archie and the gang have a mean old science teacher who seems to really hate superheroes for some reason.

He invetiably goes on a rampage in his giant robot, causing a lot of mayhem and destruction through Riverdale and even smashing Jughead's favorite vending machine Vendy in the process!

Fortunately this super-villanous rampage has not gone unnoticed and the Black Hood is the first to arrive on the scene and signals the other Crusaders. If you couldn't tell, this takes place in a nebulous idealized canon.

Archie and the gang suit up to fight the threat as well and help the Crusaders out, as the title already spoilered.

Like in the Weird Mysteries stories it's a fun-filled throwback to the stories of yesteryear with heroes and villains cameoing and various silly hijinx going down. I won't spoiler what happens exactly because I think it's well worth a read, but... well...

...let's just say on the way we get one of the certified best Jughead pages of all time.

Unfortunately 2017 saw the demise of the Dark Circle line and the Archie superheroes were once more relegated to guest appearance status, like a random cameo by the Fox in Archie The Married Life 10th Anniversary #6 in 2020.

2017 also saw the end of Archie's Sonic title (which almost outlasted the Dark Circle as well, proving insanely durable) and with the Sonic license moving to IDW Ian Flynn and his artist partners most left Archie as well.

For the 80th anniversary of the company in 2021 Flynn did return to write a special issue of the Archie & Friends mini dedicated to superheroes, with art by a roster of Archie greats.

This continuity-light issue is more in the style of the Superteens series with iconic versions of the characters and for example sees Archie team up with Bob Phantom to fight ninjas...

...as well as Veronica becoming Black Jack's new crime-solving partner. Holy card tricks, Ba-laaaack Jack!

The anniversary year also gave us a one-shot dedicated to the Shield co-starring a new iteration of the Crusaders by Rob Liefeld (with my friend David Gallaher and Jack Morelli) which set new versions of the characters but we have not yet seen a continuation of this story.

But the Archie superheroes are not dead! Just last month we saw an all-new Steel Sterling adventure by David Gallaher (again!) and there's sure to be more in the future. While I am sad of the failure of the New Crusaders, at least there's hope for the future.

At this point you're sitting there asking "But Comrade, what about Riverdale? Why have you not mentioned Riverdale and it's influence on the comics?"

I'm gonna level with you, I have NO clue what Riverdale even IS. I mean it's a serialized show, sure, but what IS it and more importantly WHY is it? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll binge-watch it but its mere existence convinces me our universe is a strange, irrational place.

But hey, it has a lot of Archie superhero references like having the Black Hood as a villain.

And the obligatory Halloween costume reference which have been a staple at Archie forever by now.

I also know that golden age supernatural avenger Madam Satan is a villain for a bit on this show and here she's actually Lilith, the First Woman and general supernatural baddie. She's also been in the Sabrina comics in this role.

Strangely, after all these decades we're finally seeing some pop culture references to these characters as the public domain golden age MLJ heroes turned up in the Image series Undiscovered Country from Charles Soule, Scott Snyder, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Leonardo Marcello Grassi.

While thinly veiled homage/parodies popped up in the delightful The Wrong Earth: Trapped on Teen Planet special from Gail Simone, Walter Geovani, Bill Morrison and Rob Lean! I love that Shield.

Sadly we have yet to see some solicited titles even get published digitally like the promised Web Dark Circle title which surely must exist somewhere in Archie's vaults.

So now that our eight decade long journey is finally over, what can we say about these long-lived but often still ephemeral characters?

I think despite their often short life cycles the characters have a definite timeless charm and many are very good concepts that hold up today. As proven several times with the right amount of love and dedication they can shine in any era.

With sterling examples like Impact and New Crusaders as well as charming personal takes like Haspiel's Fox I think the Archie superheroes deserve a place in pop culture, despite how marginalized they often are by the Riverdale gang.

When I started this retrospective I initially wanted to cover each era very quickly and not go into details, but I ended up falling for these characters more than I should as I read the many issues I missed out on in the past and I wanted to do them justice.

I want these guys to stick around, seriously. And I hope that at least some of you have discovered a series or two that you missed or rediscovered an old favorite that deserves re-reading.

What does the future hold? I don't know. But I'm glad we took this journey together and I hope you enjoyed it too.

Special thanks for indispensable hard facts on Archie comics past and present goes out to the MLJ Companion and Mightycrusaders.net which has now been running since the 90s.

And as always a huge thanks to all the writers, artists, letterers, colorists, editors and others who made these titles possible, past, present and future. You rock.

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Angry rants? Feel free to engage me.

Thank you for reading, and if you feel like tipping me to keep the lights on, feel free to visit ko-fi.com/comradebullski

Until next time, my friends.