The Archies in India: How a very American comic book became a major pop culture influence all the way here

The Archie Comics gang comes to India, as Bollywood's next-generation, directed by Zoya Akhtar, and will release on Netflix.

Coca-Cola, playing cards, Lays, paper soap, Archie Comics: Meet Y2K India’s essential travel kit. The 1990s were a time when summer was synonymous with road trips or lined with long train journeys, in a country that had just thrown open its doors to the world. We were yet to start flying everywhere. Our Internet dial-up connections were slowly gathering speed. But we did have a window on the West. Naturally, no holiday was complete without a little Archie’s action.

It was a ritual: Stopping at the Wheeler store on the platform; flipping through the stacks of Archie Digest filled with the innocent hijinks of a group of American teens; buying one and fighting over it, if not three, which was a luxury. As you chugged to your destination, you were transported parallelly to a town that didn’t actually exist, but which the world had visited.

Zoya Akhtar's 'The Archies', a Tiger Baby Production, will release this year on Netflix.

Riverdale and its teenagers were as much a part of the pop-culture lexicon of your average urban Indian GenXer and millennial as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Backstreet Boys, MTV, Baywatch and McDonald’s. But, extraordinarily, India’s obsession with Archie comics predates the liberalisation moment of 1991.

The comics’ popularity has also endured for much longer here than in their home country, where Archie Andrews and gang had lost their readers’ attention to the spandex-covered superhero squads of DC and Marvel by the 1980s. How did this happen?

The answer lies in a small family-run magazine distribution business in  Delhi, called the Variety Book Depot. Its owner, Om Arora, was a 30 year-old dropout from the Indian Army in 1974, who had read the comics and felt there was a demand for them. “India Book House was only importing around 500 copies so they couldn’t give me enough,” he told The Economic Times in 2006. “So I went on a trip to the US, I went to Archie (the comic book company) and told them I could double that.”

Arora convinced a sceptical Louis Silberkleit, then the head of Archie Comics, to give him a dealership, reported ET, and grew it into a thriving business that, by the turn of the century, was distributing Archie Comics not just to India but to countries in the region.

Archie Andrews had debuted in the popular Pep Comics in 1941, produced by MLJ Comics, at a time when superheroes were already populating the golden era of comic books. Indeed, Archie was a minor character introduced in the pages of a comic book that had The Shield on the cover.

Very much the average Joe, the clumsy but loveable “carrot-top” Archie turned out to be hit because he was relatable to a generation of young men in the middle of a World War, tired of the violence they saw around them, nostalgic for home. By 1994, he was leading his own comic book series. By 1946, MLJ had changed its name to Archie Comics.

Archie was given an ensemble of friends — the odd but crowd-favourite Jughead Jones, the smart and straight A’s student Betty Cooper, the spoiled and irresistible Veronica Lodge, the jerk jock Reggie Mantle. Riverdale, their home, was a sort of idealised version of small-town America, a suburban space complete in itself and eventually frozen in time.

The Archie comics gang

These were people who said “gee” and “gosh”, drove jalopies, hung out over milkshakes, burgers and banana splits at Pop Tate’s Chocklit Shop. All their sentences ended in exclamation marks, but nothing of major import ever went down here. Within these manicured lawns, spacious bungalows and wide roads, the most high stakes event was the love triangle between Archie, Betty and Veronica.

The love triangle between Archie, Betty and Veronica. Remember 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai'?

As the ensemble expanded — characters like the hot Cheryl Blossom, the nerdy Dexter, the musically inclined Josie, the himbo-like Moose and his brainiac girlfriend Midge added to the fray — Archie Comics acquired a reputation for being “good, clean, wholesome stuff,” as Michael I Silberkleit, the son of co-founder Louis H Silberkleit who took over the reins as co-CEO in the 1980s, told The New York Times in 2005. “Everyone reads them, all age groups,” Silberkleit told ET a year later. “Our characters never put down parents, teachers, authorities. Riverdale is the place you would like to live in. Archie is the teenager you would like your son to be.”

It was, perhaps, this overarching “goodness” — no drugs and debauchery to be found in Riverdale, but abundant family values — combined with an exposure to Americana, that sold India on Archie comics. It didn’t hurt that, despite being 60 years old, Archie and the gang refused to age, going from one Weatherbee-induced detention to a day at the beach, tripping each other up, having each other’s backs. Archie comics was the fountain of youth we all drank from.

By the turn of the millennium, Arora was selling 10,000 copies of each of the 16 titles that Archie Comics brought out every month, the ET report noted. Archie Comics had become ubiquitous, jostling for space alongside Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha and Chacha Chaudhary comics at book stores and pushcarts in the 1990s.

Eventually, the Internet began to take Jughead-sized bites of the Archie pie. It brought about a shift in perception, turning what was once cool into something decidedly lame — as it happens with things that deliberately do not keep in touch with the changing times. Arora would go a step further and initiate translation of these comics into Indian languages, furthering their reach beyond urban, metropolitan, English-speaking India.

In the US, despite being an institution and easily accessible at grocery stores, sales were diminishing through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. As a 2017 Vox article observed: “The publisher was tethered to a cartoony, simplistic art style, and the safety of the visuals was reflected in the stories, which rarely took risks and consistently returned to well-trodden narrative territory: Archie stuck in his love triangle, Betty and Veronica vying for Archie’s affection, Jughead avoiding romance in favour of gastronomic satisfaction.”

All this began to change when Jon Goldwater took on the role of Archie Comics CEO and publisher in 2009. Riverdale’s residents began to grow up, and the town itself began to get a 21st-century makeover.  Representation became important: In 2008, Riverdale High’s first Indian American character, Raj Patel was introduced. In 2010, came along Riverdale’ first openly gay character, Kevin Keller.

In 2022, the web toon Big Ethel Energy told the perspective of the school’s most unpopular character — who’d grown up to become a smart, savvy journalist and back in her hometown to look at it from the lens of someone left on the margins. A “graphic novel” released in February this year has the Archies visiting India, and introducing Bollywood star Prasad Arora — hot and influential enough to instantly grab the attention of Betty and Veronica.

Technology began to seep in, not just in updated storylines where Archie and his Dad discuss how smartphones and online shopping were making them physically unfit, but also in real life. An Archie Comics app was introduced in 2010, and the company would become the first major American comics publisher to offer new digital issues on the same release date as printed copies — a smart move that revived the fortunes of the company, but an experiment that ceased in 2021, as the company tied up with the online platform Comixology.

'Life with Archie' series

During the 2010s, a multiverse of sorts was engineered. In the series Life with Archie, the gang grew up and grappled with real adult problems such a financial trouble, long-term relationships, and mature political matter such as recession, same-sex marriage and gun control. In Afterlife with Archie, a wildly popular series, the gang treads much darker terrain after Sabrina, the resident witch, accidentally causes a zombie outbreak. Some of the hottest artists and writers in the comic book business, including Mark Waid (Daredevil), were recruited.

'Afterlife with Archie' series

Soon, Archie was headed to the screen, both big and small. CW’s Riverdale took the mystery route, transforming the sleepy town where nothing happens into a dark land rife with murders and criminals, and the gang with shades of grey. Controversial at best, Riverdale’s seventh and final season comes to close this month; even as a new franchise, perhaps, takes root all the way over here in India.

At last night’s Netflix fan event #Tudum, the first trailer for Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies premiered to much fanfare. In this interpretation, which Akhtar has said is located in India’s Anglo-Indian community, Riverdale is a hill station and the year in 1964. Isolated from the rest of the world in their little idyll, the kids seem to be up to their usual antics, dancing, singing, partying — but given this is a Tiger Baby production, there has to be more to The Archies than meets the eye.

Of course, this new adaptation of Archie comics comes at a time when the teenager holds primary place in the attention economy, and comic books are a booming industry — the comic book market is expected to reach $22 billion by 2030. Has all the determined evolution of Riverdale translated into more comic book sales? Does Gen Z harbour the same love for these comic books as past generations?

Perhaps not — but as a cornerstone of pop culture, Archie and the gang have certainly endured, creating fandoms in new generations with the screen adaptations. The Archies promises to be a trip down memory lane in more ways than one.

Coincidentally, The Archies trailer opens with a shot of a train chugging into the hill station. Trains were also a key element in that other teen monster hit, Karan Johar’s 1998 film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which the filmmaker has said was inspired by Archie Comics. In the Archies’ very mainstream appeal in India across decades, it’s possible to glean a sliver of life, the way we lived it at the dawn of the Asian century: An innocent world for a more innocent time.