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MY GRANDPA TORE THE COVERS OFF AND HANDED ME RIVERDALE

May 22, 2026

A towering banker’s box overflowing with coverless comic digests, every single one missing its front cover so you can see the raw newsprint guts, perched on the counter of a dusty 1980s corner store at midnight; behind the register stands a kindly grandfather ghost wearing an apron and reading glasses, lovingly tearing the cover off an Archie comic with a single tear of pride rolling down his cheek; the torn-off covers are stacked in a separate pile labeled “RETURN FOR CREDIT” while a tiny cartoon Archie Andrews climbs out of the coverless pile waving hello; in the background, barely visible through the shop window, the Punisher’s skull logo glows ominously and a single zombie hand reaches up from behind a milkshake; warm fluorescent gas-station lighting, dust motes, a hand-lettered sign reading “IF YOU BOUGHT THIS WITHOUT A COVER IT IS TECHNICALLY STOLEN BABY”

I learned to read on stolen property.

Not, like, real crime. Beautiful crime. My grandpa ran a store, and back then if a comic or a magazine didn’t sell, you didn’t ship the whole thing back to the distributor. You tore the cover clean off, sent the cover back for credit, and the coverless guts were supposed to get pulped. Destroyed. Erased from the official record.

Except my grandpa didn’t pulp them. He handed them to me.

So I grew up with these armloads of coverless Archie digests, the front torn away to reveal the raw newsprint underneath, and every single one had that little warning buried in the indicia: if you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware it was reported as “unsold and destroyed." I was, functionally, reading a stack of comics that the publisher believed had been incinerated. Riverdale was a ghost town that only existed in my grandpa’s store and my hands. I felt like I was getting away with something. I kind of was.

Then, years later, an aunt unloaded an enormous collection on me — a real one, intact covers and all, a box so heavy it had opinions about my spine. And that was it. I was a lifer. Some kids get baptized. I got a banker’s box of Double Digests.

Here’s the part that sealed it, though: Sarah loves them too. We bonded over Betty and Veronica — specifically the eternal, unwinnable, frankly cruel question of Betty or Veronica. We both lean Betty, for the record. Team girl-next-door, team perpetual runner-up who absolutely deserves better than a ginger weathervane who can’t make up his mind. (Veronica is great. I’m not a monster. But Betty would never stand you up to go to a yacht party, and we know it.) And honestly I love the whole cast — Jughead, Reggie being a little gremlin, Moose, Big Ethel, poor exhausted Mr. Weatherbee, Pop Tate just trying to run a Chock’lit Shoppe in a town full of teenage anarchists. The whole milkshake-flavored ecosystem.

But my actual favorite — the one I will defend in a court of law — is the single most gloriously specific thing Archie Comics ever printed: Archie’s R/C Racers. 1989. Ten issues. The entire premise is that a corporation sponsors Archie and Reggie to each captain a team of Riverdale teenagers in a radio-controlled car race across all fifty states, with the high school providing chaperones, while they foil the schemes of a villain named Babette. That’s the book. Teenagers. Toy cars. Fifty states. Corporate sponsorship. A nemesis named Babette. I cannot overstate how hard this premise went for a nine-year-old who already loved both Archie and RC cars — it was like the comic had been beamed directly out of my skull and handed back to me with better art. They raced through New York and Nashville and Texas, the rivalry got a horsepower upgrade, and somewhere out there a marketing executive got promoted for the idea of “Archie, but make it a fifty-state toy commercial.” Nine-year-old me thought it was the greatest concept in the history of human storytelling. Honestly? Nine-year-old me was right.

And here’s the thing — once you’ve accepted that Archie will greenlight “the gang races RC cars across America for a sponsor,” you start to understand the real secret. Because that’s the wholesome end of it.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about when you fall in love with Archie Comics as a wholesome little institution.

It is completely deranged under the hood.

Like. Okay. Buckle up, because this is the part where the malt shop catches fire.

Archie dies. For real. Life with Archie #36, 2014. The most all-American teenager in the history of paper takes an assassin’s bullet meant for his friend — Senator Kevin Keller, the openly gay senator — and he bleeds out in Pop’s. They killed Archie Andrews. The freckled face of milkshake innocence, gone, in a comic you could buy at the grocery checkout next to the gum.

Sabrina caused a zombie apocalypse. Sabrina the Teenage Witch is an Archie property, and in Afterlife with Archie she tries to resurrect Jughead’s dog — Hot Dog, rest in peace — and instead kicks off a full Riverdale-eats-itself necromantic zombie plague. The town you associate with sock hops becomes a Romero film. With the same characters. Same art style, even. It is genuinely terrifying and it rules.

Jughead is canonically asexual. Confirmed on the page in 2016. And the second you hear it you go — oh. Obviously. The man in the crown who has never once cared about the Betty/Veronica war because he is busy thinking about hamburgers was ace the entire time, and it is the most coherent piece of continuity in the entire franchise.

The Punisher showed up. 1994. Frank Castle. The Punisher — gun-toting trench-coat murder vigilante from the grim end of Marvel — crosses over into Riverdale, mistakes Archie for a criminal he’s hunting, and the plot involves Veronica getting kidnapped. This actually happened. And because it worked, it opened a door that has never closed: Archie has since met the Predator, Sharknado, and KISS. The band. KISS came to Riverdale.

And that’s before you get to the part where Archie published Sonic the Hedgehog comics for over two decades — the longest-running video game comic ever — until a lawsuit nuked the entire continuity off the map. Or the part where the TV show went so feral by the end that the gang was dealing with time travel, a comet, and literal superpowers.

This is what I love about the whole thing, and what my grandpa accidentally taught me with a box of coverless contraband: you cannot kill Riverdale. You can tear its cover off and report it destroyed. You can shoot the protagonist. You can turn Sabrina into a necromancer and send in the Punisher and let KISS through the door. And the digest still shows up at the grocery checkout next month, three bucks, Betty and Veronica still squabbling over the same lovable idiot, like none of it ever happened. It’s a cockroach. A wholesome, indestructible cockroach in a varsity letterman jacket.

My grandpa couldn’t strip the covers fast enough to keep me from becoming this. And now I’ve got a wife who’s Team Betty too, which means at some point I’m legally obligated to dig out that box and make her pick a side for real.

Stay coverless, defend Betty, and never trust a teenager who runs a malt shop.