Archie & Friends: Summer Vacation #1 - Comic Book Review

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Archie & Friends: Summer Vacation #1 

Get ready for a BEACH PARTY BONANZA with Archie and all his pals 'n' gals in RIVERDALE! It's time for pool parties, barbecue blowouts, and maybe even a little summer romance... hopefully no one gets too sun burned!


There are 4 major stories in the book all new and being a vacation book has all to do with summer and beaches. We have the entire gang echoing the vibes of summer with the heat making its presence felt.

As a child I discovered the Archies in the folds of the Sunday weekly magazine that used to come bundled with our English newspaper. There used to be 4-5 pages of various comics, majorly in B/W and I waited every week eagerly for the weekend and would be extremely heartbroken in the weeks where the magazine would be missing due to various reasons.
I started buying the Digests and Double Digests from 1990 when after a long struggle was able to convince the newsstand vendor to give these to me. 
Digital access then was a pipe dream. 



Get ready for a BEACH PARTY BONANZA with Archie and all his pals 'n' gals in RIVERDALE! It's time for pool parties, barbecue blowouts, and maybe even a little summer romance... hopefully no one gets too sun burned!

There are 4 major stories in the book all new and being a vacation book has all to do with summer and beaches. We have the entire gang echoing the vibes of summer with the heat making its presence felt.

As a child I discovered the Archies in the folds of the Sunday weekly magazine that used to come bundled with our English newspaper. There used to be 4-5 pages of various comics, majorly in B/W and I waited every week eagerly for the weekend and would be extremely heartbroken in the weeks where the magazine would be missing due to various reasons.
I started buying the Digests and Double Digests from 1990 when after a long struggle was able to convince the newsstand vendor to give these to me. 
Digital access then was a pipe dream. 

With all the reinventing going on in the comic worlds, reinventions and changing, resurrecting beloved characters, I enjoy when books like this one, in the classic Archie comics style come up. 
The way the gang spent huge amounts of time on the beach or at Pop Tate's, makes me miss the summers without a care in the world. So when I read the word vacation it struck the right chord in my mind. I think this book will similarly bring you unmitigated joy and happiness as it did to me.

The story & plot development, the character development and the pacing are all just incredibly superb and really pull the reader into the book beautifully.

The dialogues, character interactions and seeming evolutions is uncanny. The stories which in the Archies more often than not tend to be short 1 pagers or a few pagers are complete storylines on their own and egg on the book as a whole.

The art work is of beautiful and one can see the detailed work come to life. The special characters of Babette and Frankie were also great in the story - That's Just Beachy.




The book starts with a new Pop Tate - Jughead story - "We can work it out" where we head to the beach with Jughead on the prowl on Pope Tate's finest. 


It is followed up by "Hot or Not", with the temperature soaring and Riverdale's finest simmering in the heat and with power outages aplenty, AC's have given up the ghost, where do they look for a rescue.....


The third story in the lot is the afore mentioned "That's Just Beachy", which has its heart at the right place with a generational story. Nice.


Finally we end with "Summer Smart" and Oh boy we have seen the faculty of Riverdale in some fabulous adventures on their own earlier, we see the no nonsense Miss Grundy in an awesome hip role...

This is family reading at its finest.

I recommend this book wholeheartedly...




Please do not forget to post your comments. I am an equal opportunity person so would love to hear your love or your hate for the review or book in any order. Please write what you did not like or whether the book was an absolute disaster for you and why.

You can also follow/like my review at Goodreads here - 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4783294740

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