A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong

With all apologies to our readers in the Sunshine State --- and let's be real here, you know this better than the rest of us --- every headline that comes out of Florida paints a picture of a sunny, tourist-friendly peninsula that also seems to exist in a combination of Mad Max times and The Purge. So really, it was only a matter of time before those terrifying yet intriguing headlines made their way into comics. Now, fresh off their adventures in "Welcome To Clowntown," Valiant's mismatched Archer and Armstrong are coming face to face with... well, pretty much everything, from bath salts on down, as they take a trip to Florida. Check out a preview below!

If you're a fan of Valiant's Faith --- and you should be, she's great --- then you're in for a pretty good time next Wednesday. Not only does July 20 see the release of the all-new Faith ongoing series from Jody Houser, Pere Perez, Marguerite Sauvage and Colleen Doran, which picks up where the fantastic "Hollywood and Vine" miniseries left off and introduces an all-new supervillain, but we're also going to see her in a pretty significant guest appearance. In A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong #5, by Rafer Roberts, Mike Norton, and Allen Passalaqua, Faith and Archer are finally going on their first date, and if you thought seeing Archer trying to use emojis was cute, wait'll you see the conversation they have over dinner. Of course, given their night jobs --- and the fact that there's a shady dude watching them over mozzarella sticks --- I'm going to guess that the night might not go as smoothly as they'd like. Check out a preview!

Here's the thing about unlettered preview pages: They are, by their nature, incomplete, so you're only really getting half of the story. Still, since comics are first and foremost a visual medium, you can still sort of follow along with sequential art. Unless, of course, you're reading a book like A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong. If that's the case, well, your guess is as good as mine. Don't get me wrong, it's not that the storytelling is bad. Far from it, in fact --- the art by Mike Norton is great. It's just that this book gets so weird, so fast that one second you're reading about jogging in the park, and the next you're seeing a monkey in a top hat, a frog with a crown made of fire, and a bunch of circus strongmen who may or may not be failed clones of Armstrong. That's just how it goes in Clowntown.