Kevin Smith’s ‘Archie’ Crossover Has the Opportunity to Payoff a 28-Year-Old Joke

Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob characters are famous for popping up in movies like Clerks, Mallrats and Dogma. But the stoner duo also exist within the fictional worlds of Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scream franchise, as evidenced by the most baffling moment from Scream 3.

But now Jay and Bob are set to crossover with a most unexpected pop-culture property: Archie. Per The Hollywood Reporter, an upcoming “double-sized” comic book titled Kevin Smith Presents: Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob will find the Riverdale gang crossing paths with the residents of the View Askewniverse — and presumably learning some new four-letter words in the process.

Weirder still, the book takes place after the events of Clerks III, in which (spoiler) protagonist Dante Hicks dies of a heart attack. According to Smith, who penned the comic, “Archie plays a role in the healing (process),” adding, “not only is this my stab at a classic American franchise that existed long before me that I read as a kid. It’s a midlife crisis project about death and learning to deal.”

Just to reiterate: This is a comic in which the characters from the critically-acclaimed 1994 film Clerks cope with the trauma of personal loss thanks to the help of Archie Andrews, the jalopy-riding perpetual teenager who once canonically battled The Predator.

The comic’s storyline reportedly finds Archie working alongside Randall after landing a summer job at the Quick Stop convenience store, presumably because Dante’s tragic death created an opening.

While we don’t have much information beyond that, it’s worth noting that the comic won’t be the first time that Smith has tackled the Archie Comics mythology. 1997’s Chasing Amy included a memorable scene in which Hooper argues that “Archie and Jughead were lovers,” because “Archie was the bitch and Jughead was the butch.”

While Jason Lee’s character Banky vociferously argues against this theory, Ben Affleck’s Holden points out that it would explain why Archie “never did quite settle on Betty or Veronica.”

Which does beg the question: Will any of this come up in Smith’s comic? He is suddenly in the position to confirm, or at least suggest, that Archie and Jughead are a couple. 

While the interpretation pre-dates Smith’s movie, a confirmation of it would be a first for the franchise, although the series finale of Riverdale did randomly reveal that the four leads were secretly in a quad relationship.

It would also contradict one recent comic series, which revealed that Jughead is asexual. But seemingly no one is too concerned with the continuity of a series that once included a story in which Archie is assassinated.