Archie Is Mr. Justice #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeArchie Is Mr. Justice #4 serves as the series finale of Archie Comics' 2024–2025 premium superhero event, delivering the full origin story of Reggie Mantle's transformation into the supervillain Kid Wicked and depicting — with genuine dramatic stakes — the death of Archie Andrews as Mr. Justice. The issue completes a structurally ambitious four-part narrative in which each chapter shifts both creative team and point-of-view character, a Rashomon-style storytelling experiment rare in the publisher's history. By casting Reggie, one of the most familiar supporting characters in American comics, as the tragic villain responsible for his best friend's end, the series reframes 80-plus years of frenemy dynamics through a genuinely bleak superhero lens. The four-issue run represents Archie Comics' most direct attempt since the New Riverdale era to engage with the tradition of superhero deconstruction associated with works like Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The series was conceived by Senior Director of Editorial Jamie L. Rotante as an 'event' prestige project launching in November 2024, built around the Golden Age MLJ Comics character Mr. Justice being recontextualized as Archie Andrews' superhero identity in an alternate Riverdale. Each of the four issues was deliberately assigned to a different writer-artist team — Tim Seeley and Mike Norton for issue #1, Amanda Diebert and Brent Schoonover for #2, Kenny Porter and Maria Laura Sanapo for #3, and Blake Howard and Federico Sabbatini for the finale — with the stated editorial goal of creating a multi-perspective narrative structure. Writer Blake Howard acknowledged in a post-publication interview that Archie's death was an editorial mandate baked into the series from the beginning, with it falling to him to script the mechanics of how it played out in the closing chapter.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Issue #4 (of 4) was released May 21, 2025, published by Archie Comics under their 'Premium Event' banner.
- Written by Blake Howard; art by Federico Sabbatini; colors by Glenn Whitmore; letters by Jack Morelli.
- Main cover by Reiko Murakami; variant covers by Wilfredo Torres & Matt Herms, and Matt Talbot.
- The Matt Talbot variant cover is a direct homage to Batman: The Killing Joke.
- This issue completes the origin of Reggie Mantle's supervillain identity 'Kid Wicked' and depicts the death of Archie Andrews as Mr. Justice — an editorially mandated story beat built into the series from its inception.
- The series uses a Rashomon-style, multi-POV structure: each issue is told from the perspective of a different Riverdale character (Jughead, Veronica, Betty, and Reggie in the finale) with a different creative team per installment.
- Mr. Justice is a Golden Age character from Archie's MLJ Comics predecessor imprint; the series embeds those original MLJ comics as in-universe artifacts that inspire Archie and Jughead to create the Mr. Justice persona.
- The series was distributed through DC Comics' distribution network, as confirmed by Diamond order codes and previews credited to DC Comics.
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