“Archie” #636 is going to blow a few fuses in crazy fundamentalist Star-Wars-hating parts of America, seeing that A) it gender-flips the Archie cast (and frankly female Archie is troublingly cute) and B) it’s drawn by Gisele, who’s mostly famous for Menage a 3, a webcomic we can’t link here because it’s not safe for work (use Google) and features explicitly drawn gay sex on a fairly regular basis.
No doubt once the kind of people who think about gay sex way too much for supposed heterosexuals find this out, they’ll go ape. That the cover is done by Jess Fink, who, uh, also does an erotic webcomic, will probably just add fuel to the fire.
Of course, if you know your comics history, you know that Archie has a long history of artists doing smut on the side. The “house style” of Archie was defined by Dan DeCarlo, who also made money drawing pinups like these. Believe it or not, those images were published by Marvel’s predecessor, by and large. Among “good girl” art enthusiasts, original DeCarlo art work is actually highly prized.
So, before the outrage machine fires up, and really that should be reserved for Sabrina becoming a cat-banging superhero, keep in mind, repressed America, that Archie was defined by, well, smut.