Jughead's Time Police #1

History

The series grew out of a late-1980s story feature written by Rich Margopoulos that had appeared across various Archie titles, including the regular Jughead comic, before demand and editorial interest coalesced it into a dedicated six-issue bimonthly series beginning with a July 1990 cover date (on-sale April 3, 1990). Scott Fulop served as editor, with Victor Gorelick as managing editor and Richard H. Goldwater as editor-in-chief — the standard Archie masthead of the era. Artist Rex Lindsey handled pencils for the first two issues, bringing a clean, slightly waxy line style to the book before being replaced from issue #3 onward by Gene Colan — a Marvel veteran best known for Tomb of Dracula — whose dramatically shadowed, unconventionally composed pages gave the series a visual personality wholly unlike the house style of the time. Jon D'Agostino provided inks throughout much of the run.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First issue of a six-issue bimonthly series published by Archie Comics, with a July 1990 cover date and an on-sale date of April 3, 1990; the series ran through May 1991.
• Written by Rich Margopoulos, with pencils by Rex Lindsey and inks by Jon D'Agostino; Margopoulos scripted all six issues.
• Introduces the formal series-level debut of January McAndrews, a Time Police Marshal from the 29th century who is a descendant of Archie Andrews and becomes Jughead's partner and love interest across all six issues.
• Jughead's time-travel mechanism is his signature beanie, upgraded to a high-tech device that transports its wearer to whichever time and place they concentrate on — requiring a level of focus that is described as one of Jughead's weaknesses.
• The lead story, 'A Yen for Spaghetti' (told in four chapters), hinges on a butterfly-effect paradox: Jughead eating Marco Polo's noodles in 13th-century China erases his own family tree, prompting him and January to correct the timeline.
• Beginning with issue #3, Gene Colan — celebrated for his Marvel work on Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula — replaced Lindsey as penciller, an unusual pairing of a Marvel-style dramatic artist with Archie's all-ages material that fans have since highlighted as a distinctive creative quirk of the series.
• The series is part of a documented wave of experimental Archie spin-off titles published between approximately 1987 and 1991, which also included Archie 3000, Jughead's Diner, Dilton's Strange Science, and Explorers of the Unknown.
• Archie Comics collected the complete six-issue run, along with Time Police stories from 1988–1991 and a relevant 2015 Jughead story, in a digest-format trade paperback released in 2018; a separate 2019 reboot mini-series by writer Sina Grace and artist Derek Charm was also collected as a trade paperback in 2020.

Key issues in Jughead's Time Police

Other variants of Jughead's Time Police #1 (1)