Fiona Staples, best known for her work on the Eisner-winning Saga, will join the series as the aritst of the first few issues along with writer Mark Waid — but while Waid is expected to stick around for a while, Staples will be gone after just three months.
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So…who could follow her up? We have some ideas.
Culver is somebody who could strike a great balance between Staples’ style and the traditional Archie look. His characters aren’t totally “animated,” but certainly he’s compatible with that sort of world and some of the zanier elements of a comedy comic woud be right in his wheelhouse.
He’s also proven with stellar work on Monkeybrain’s Edison Rex that he’s got a sense of history and a love for comics that can be tongue-in-cheek without being too biting.
Few artists have managed to make lovely, detailed art so clean, crisp and all-ages friendly in the recent past than “Doc” Shaner, whose recent projects includ Flash Gordon for Dynamite and an upcoming Convergence miniseries featuring the Shazam family.
One of the best visual storytellers in the business, Ordway provides detail, fluid action and, perhaps most important for a book like Archie, some of the most expressive faces in comics.
He’s also got a history as a workhorse, so if you want somebody who could probably take the book going forward after a short run with Staples, he might not be a bad place to start.
Speaking of expressive faces, here’s a guy who has literally made a decades-long reputation with that as one of his biggest selling points.
With a humor comic, and something that doesn’t have a ton of widescreen action, you could hardly do better than Maguire. Not only does he have the draftsmanship, but he’s spent his whole career working around Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis’ massive word balloons, so you know he’ll give your dialogue room to breathe.
Besides having an existing relationship with Waid and a style that gels nicely with Staples’, Rivera has shown on both Daredevil and The Valiant that he’s an artist capable of going well outside of normal superhero comfort zones and depicting people at their most human.
