I'm surprised about the overwhelmingly negative reaction here to the news about DC reviving the Archie superheroes. As boox909 said, "Elsewhere a few people are celebrating this development", and this includes the fans of those characters at mightycrusaders.net. But not here. I can only assume that this is because you guys are fans of golden age comics and not of modern superhero comics.
Personally, I'll probably give it a brief chance. However, my concern is DC's track record:
They bought the rights to the Quality characters in 1956. Where are they now? They're nobodies who get reinvented every ten years to no acclaim whatsoever and are as likely to be killed offscreen as put in a cameo to support someone else's story. Or Uncle Sam gets trotted out to show what evil jingoists Americans are. The Blackhawks (who DC did right by for about twenty years, it should be mentioned) are forgotten except for Lady Blackhawk, who wasn't even a Quality creation.
After a few years of licensing them, they bought the Fawcett characters in 1980. Where are they now? Shazam is dead. Billy is the wizard. Mary's a fruitcake without a coherent reason. Freddy is Shazam because they're tired of using the Marvel name. Other characters are revived seemingly at random, but are mostly exiled to "Fawcett City," which I always envision as the old Jewish ghetto in Prague, but with fewer people caring about the inhabitants.
Around 1983, they bought the Charlton properties. Where are they now? Dead, maimed, insane, or non-existant. Except for Judomaster, oddly, who despite being a retcon character, somehow became an important Golden Ager.
In 1991, they licensed the Archie characters, rebooted them completely, and then abandoned any plans of marketing it in hopes that it'd just go away, which it did. That's the saddest, because those books had huge market potential that the new regime just didn't care about.
Wildstorm and Eisner don't count, because they're insulated from the DCU proper by one contrivance or another, and technically managed outside of DC, which brings us to today.
I'd like to be more interested, but really, I've danced this dance before. They'll be exiled to their own city, or put into titles that don't quite integrate with the rest. Some might be killed so we can pretend that Superboy-Prime is a scary villain, rather than merely irritating. DC will claim that the sales numbers don't support continuing it, and the fans will feel they've wasted two or three years.
I want them to prove me very wrong, honestly, and hit this one out of the park. However, they've already failed the first (important, but not critical) test in my eyes, because they're treating the characters as new, rather than historical and important. While you might be right that Archie wouldn't have treated them better, I'm concerned that they'll be treated as tiny fish in an enormous pond. Static gets Titans membership while the Shield joins the other "unknowns" as the Mighty Crusaders, which never gets invited to the summer crossovers, which doesn't seem very egalitarian.
That's how I (I think it was mostly my fault) pushed this off-topic, I think, looking at the situation by analogy. And because DC has failed so miserably at integration in the past, that sort of encouraged a lot of people to vent their bile...
On the other hand, I actually AM much more of a fan of older comics than new. The form is more experimental, the stories and art are more workmanlike, and there's less of a defensive attitude to the whole thing. Add in the faster pace and some really wild concepts, and I'd kind of rather spend money keeping this site open (and buying DVDs and hard drives to store downloads) than keeping DC in business.
