Sean McGuire's Reviews > Jughead, Vol. 1

I love Jughead.

And I could honestly stop this review right there and have this perfectly summed up in three words. And it's clear that the creative team (Chip Zdarsky and Erica Henderson, the latter being the artist of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Volume 1: Squirrel Power and its sequels) love this burger-loving, whoopee cap wearing teen just as much as I've come too. It's ridiculous how much I've come to love Jughead Jones in such a short time, but the writing sucked me in after the visual look of Jughead initially grabbed me.

There was so much in here that I loved. Many of the jokes (both written on the page, said in caption as an editorial note, or purely visual) had me laughing out loud, and there were so many things to see in the backgrounds and be amused by. And something even better? Chip Zdarsky writing two things into the Archie canon forever: 1) Dilton being an amazing dancer, and 2) Jughead being asexual. Particularly that second one (although Dilton's dance moves are quite boss).

I felt that it was so incredibly important that a facet of the LGBTQ+ spectrum that gets virtually no representation in media suddenly got a character with 75 years of story. Chip's decision to do this fits perfectly into the character's long history, and having Archie Comics' groundbreaking openly gay student Kevin Keller be the one to reveal this information to the reader in such a casual manner (as if it weren't a big deal, because it's not a big deal to him or their friends) was such a wonderful thing and it meant so much to see it be handled as perfectly as it was.

I cannot wait for Jughead, Vol. 2 to come out March 14th! Super excited to see Sabrina the Teenaged Witch interacting with this current incarnation of Jughead. In the mean time... on to Archie, Vol. 2!