Archie Teases Mysterious Plans For Possible ‘Jughead’ Relaunch

Over the past few years, Archie Comics has been revitalizing their line with stories like Life With Archie and crossover stunts like Archie Meets Kiss, but now it appears that the desire to reinvent their line has been turned on one of Riverdale's most stalwart citizens. After subscription information for Jughead was removed from Archie's website and emails went out to fans saying that the title had been canceled, Robot 6 discovered that Archie's best pal might be headed for a relaunch.The response from Archie's Director of Publicity, Adam Tracey, is pretty cryptic:

As you're aware, Archie has been reinventing itself for the last three years. That reinvention process is most visible in books like Life With Archie, Kevin Keller, The Art of Betty & Veronica, the New Crusaders comic, the Sonic and Archie Super Specials, and much more. Because Jughead is a very important character to us, that reinvention process will also apply to him. So while we're putting together exactly how to do that, we've put the Jughead comic on hiatus until the relaunch happens. Fans of Jughead can rest assured that they'll definitely be seeing more of him in the future.

It's pretty interesting that they'd feel the need to put Jughead on hiatus. It's been one of the flagship titles of Archie's new direction, starting with the full-length story in Jughead #200 by Robot Chicken writer Tom Root, Rex Lindsey and Jim Amash that showed just how fun those characters could be while still staying true to what defined them as characters.

Throw in the fact that Jughead has always been a character that the company has always put into more experimental titles -- recent issues added "secret agent" to his past roles as high school student, superhero and short-order cook at a diner that existed outside of time and space -- and it's hard to figure out why they'd feel the need to relaunch him. Archie's characters, after all, are built to be "typical teens," and tend to evolve pretty naturally over time without the need for hard reboots.

Maybe the plan is to take Jughead in a more serious direction by using his legendary appetite to comment on the scourge of childhood obesity?

Or to finally address and correct his rampant misogyny:

Or maybe to return the edge of hard sci-fi and capitalize on the success of Doctor Who by reviving his time-travel adventures with the Amy Pond-esque January McAndrews:

Either way, it's sparked my curiosity, and it's so vague that it's hard to even speculate. If I had to, though, I'd express my deep and abiding hope that Forsythe P. Jones's return after hiatus won't be as "Jughead," but as the hard-rockin' punk, Captain Thrash.