I say this with absolutely no snark intended… but are the Archie comics really completely unknown to some people? That’s mind blowing to me, but probably because I’ve always been a fan of them. I just thought everyone knew about them like they know about JFK and Elvis.

Is it international viewers who are just finding this out? Or Americans too?

The comic has been around for nearly 80 years, and contains an entire universe that includes “Josie and the Pussycats” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”. The series ran for many decades as just the comedic journey of some typical All-American teenagers in a small town. Silly little love triangles, fights between rival football teams and loads of punny names for common items and brands. And they still use that today in the TV show, like when they refer to Veronica’s American Express credit card as “American Excess”.

The series got a major overhaul this century and started to more resemble the tv series we see now. The show creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was (is I think) actually the Chief Creative Officer for the comics and played a huge part in the massive changes that took place in the books.

I definitely encourage you to read up a bit about the history of the comic books! It actually makes the show way more enjoyable cause there are little Easter eggs throughout.

I think one of the reasons they cast Molly Ringwald as Archie’s Mom was to help explain why Archie is a redhead, and help us cut the connection to the Blossoms. But, that being said I absolutely would not at all be surprised if sometime in the future they revealed that his mom is actually a Blossom, or Clifford Blossom was his biological father. They played up Clifford’s attachment to him pretty hard in season one.