What’s supposed to be a summer job at the Quick Stop for Archie Andrews turns into so much more — a budding friendship with co-worker Randal Graves, crashing a Pussycats concert, a potential new love interest, Jay and Silent Bob being, well, Jay and Silent Bob, and a musical number that will be burned into your brain forever. Plus, could Jay and Silent Bob help Archie finally choose between Betty and Veronica? SNOOGANS. Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob #1 is written by Kevin Smith, drawn by Fernando Ruiz, inked by Rich Koslowski, colored by Matt Herms and lettered by Jack Morelli for Archie Comics with Secret Stash Press.
The thing about Archie Andrews that makes him perfect for intercompany crossovers is there’s little to no continuity baggage involved. He lives in Riverdale, he has two girls in his life who both want to date him, his best friend is Jughead, he’s accident prone and he plays guitar. Now go have him meet Batman or something.
That’s been the formula for Archie’s intercompany adventures since 1994, when he met the Punisher. In fact, Archie’s wholesome image has proved repeatedly that it plays well against the darker corners of comics, to the point where he can meet the Punisher or the Predator and it stops making AI-generated listicles of “comics’ CRAZIEST team-ups.” Surely, if Archie can handle a zombie apocalypse, he can handle a Sharknado.
But can he handle Jay and Silent Bob?
The quick-and-dirty plot of this one-shot: Archie gets a job at the Quick Stop because his best friend Jughead (Forsythe Pendleton Jones III) is a relative of Alyssa Jones, Joey Lauren Adams’ character in Chasing Amy. After a double-disastrous run-in with Betty and Veronica, Archie mentions to all of his new Jersey friends that he can score them tickets to a Josie & the Pussycats show in Riverdale, for which Archie’s band, The Archies, is supposed to open. But, *gasp*, Archie is sick, so a super-stoned Jay and Silent Bob fill in, and Jay counters their 1960s throwback pop with a full on-stage Jim Morrison diatribe, complete with nudity. The whole thing ends with Randal Graves declaring Archie one of the Quick Stop gang, as Dante Hicks looks down on them from Heaven like Eazy-E in “Tha Crossroads” video.
Here’s where that continuity baggage I mentioned earlier comes into play. While the intercompany crossovers of the 1990s had to juggle things like Peter Parker’s clone being Spider-Man, Wally West being the Flash and Kyle Rayner being the Green Lantern, Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob assumes you’ve seen any Kevin Smith movie that came out after Clerks II.
You’re dropped into a Quick Stop where Dante “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” Hicks has died of a heart attack, as happened in 2022’s Clerks III; loudmouthed drug dealer Jay has a daughter, as revealed in 2019’s Jay & Silent Bob Reboot; and that weird little Elias kid from Clerks II dresses like a middle-aged goth, or, as Randal says, a “Chappell Roan clone.” If you’re coming to this with any sort of nostalgia for the Kevin Smith films of your youth, you’re instantly lost, and it falls to Archie to save the day.
On the one hand, Smith’s characters are not cartoon characters or roles meant to be cast and recast, and his View Askew-niverse by now has traced the arc of their lives from their mid-20s into their 50s. On the other hand, in those movies, many of them act like cartoon characters, and there was literally a Clerks cartoon in the 2000s. But there is a Riverdale-ish, frozen-in-amber quality to Smith’s version of New Jersey, as he checks in on the same characters over and over again, whether that’s to diminishing returns or not.
Full disclosure: I checked out on Smith after 2008’s Zack & Miri Make a Porno, a movie I quite like but that benefits from Smith aping the style of the Judd Apatow-produced comedies that were popular at the time.
Smith fills the supersized comic with his trademark foul language and bathroom humor right off the bat, making it clear that not only is this not a typical Archie comic, it’s not even a typical Archie crossover. That said, he makes expected jokes like Randal explaining to Archie that he could have a three-way with Betty and Veronica, and Jay and Bob running afoul of Riverdale’s local drug dealer, not to mention callbacks to his movies.
If I’m coming off as cynical, I want to be clear that I enjoyed the comic, but in the way that I enjoy most of the things by Smith that I’ve seen — in spite of its flaws, with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia one must wear to engage with it in a modern setting. He knows that, and I know that he knows that I know that. That’s the game.
Ruiz keeps the whole thing anchored in Archie’s traditional house style, filling the Riverdale-set scenes with lots of familiar faces and cameos by characters the book otherwise wouldn’t have room for. If you squint, you might even see a couple panels that adopt the style of the Clerks cartoon. (No “bear is driving,” though, sad to say.)
(It should be noted that Ruiz, like Smith, and like me, is a Jersey guy. All different parkway exits, though. Also, Central Jersey is real; don’t @ me.)
The comic sets up a possible sequel in which Jughead takes a turn visiting Jay’s world, which given the number of variant covers hanging in the gallery in the back, seems like something both Archie and Smith would put money into. I’d probably read another of these, for the same reason any middle-aged comics reader would — that greatest of team-ups, nostalgia and morbid curiosity. Snootchie bootchies!
Buy Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom. Follow him @danielpgrote.bsky.social.
