Archer & Armstrong Vol. 1
March 23, 2017 8:57 AM - by Fred Van Lente - Subscribe

After years of meditation and training, 18-year-old Obadiah Archer has been dispatched to New York City to carry out the sacred mission of his family's sect - locate and kill the fun-loving, hard-drinking immortal known as Armstrong!
posted by KMH (3 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
So this needs a little explaining.

I don't normally read comics. Not since I was a teenager (Neil Gaiman's Sandman; Love and Rockets - even as a teenager I was a bit of a hipster).

Years go by.

The dingy local comic store suddenly expands it's collection of RPG stuff from a half a shelf worth teetering towards its (and your) doom from somewhere near the ceiling to a whole glorious sister store next door.

Free RPG Day becomes a thing.

And there among the thin crappy booklets is a glossy, comic-style masterpiece: Valiant Universe Roleplaying Game.

I have no idea what it's about but the art is great (who knew? A comics game with art?), the writing is clean and clear, and the ideas are a weird mix of old established in-jokes I've never come across and intriguing game possibilities.

Fast forward a couple years and I can actually afford to buy some of the trades. Where to start? A&A of course.

Valiant is kind of the evil twin of mainstream comics. There's a flipside, 90s version of every superhero trope you can think of. But done as superheros. Archer & Armstrong don't totally fit this mold; they represent the extreme of the whole concept by pushing everything to the extreme. Everything.

I can only recommend grabbing a #1 to see what I mean. You'll be glad you did.
posted by KMH at 6:46 AM on March 24, 2017


Brings back memories. I read the first two years back in the 90s.
posted by KaizenSoze at 9:39 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm tempted to get hold of 90s A&A on eBay. Has it aged well, as far as you could reconstruct from memory?
posted by KMH at 2:51 PM on March 25, 2017


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