Archie is entering a new era for the character and all of Riverdale's favorites with Oni Press and Archie's new #1s. Ben H. Winters, the acclaimed novelist, takes up the main title, Archie! We spoke with him about bringing his mostly serious literary background (dark mysteries, drama television) to pure comedy for the first time, tracing his sense of pacing back to his college comedy troupe and punk band roots. He describes his Riverdale as infinitely elastic, a setting that can stretch from the diner to a mountaintop while staying instantly recognizable, and explains that his debut arc centers on a film festival specifically so he can reintroduce the whole core cast at once, each filtered through a different genre pastiche. Beneath the gags, Winters talks about weaving in a quieter thread about the anxiety of late adolescence, using a recurring Jughead's Journal backup feature to hint at an unfolding, faintly sci-fi mystery about why Riverdale never seems to change, while also pushing to diversify the town's cast to reflect a more realistic version of the world.

Nicholas Binge's new novella The Abyss opens with an idea that horror fans will recognize immediately, even if they've never set foot near a Lovecraftian tentacle: the soul-crushing claustrophobia of showing up to the same job, on the same loop, until the walls start to feel less like walls and more like a death sentence. In our interview, Binge breaks down how he built a cosmic horror story from something as mundane as an open-plan office (the absolute worst idea), and why he thinks late-stage capitalism is the closest thing we have to a real-world Lovecraftian entity. We also get into the book's eerily prescient AI subplot (written years before ChatGPT was a household name), the self-directed rage that fueled its doom-scrolling horror, and that unforgettable scene from The Matrix that's haunted Binge since he was eleven years old.

Joseph Eckert's debut novel The Traveler follows Scott, an average Midwestern dad whose car vanishes around him one ordinary commute — and who discovers he's been thrown 24 hours into the future. The twist: it keeps happening, and each jump doubles, flinging him two days forward, then four, then eight, sixteen, and on, while his brilliant son Lyle grows obsessed with figuring out the math behind his father's disappearances and finding a way to bring him home. He stopped by the show to speak about the novel.

In our conversation, Eckert traced his time-travel influences back to a college paper comparing Terminator 2, Time Cop, and Back to the Future — and explained why he built his own story around forward motion instead of the backward paradoxes those films wrestle with.

We dig into what makes the book hit harder than a typical high-concept premise is its personal nature. Eckert started writing it 15 years ago, identifying with the son, but returned to it as a father himself, reshaping Scott's interiority (with help from his editors and agent) to capture the specific horror of missing your child's life in irreversible leaps. He also softened the marriage at the story's center, moving away from his own experience as the child of divorce toward a more tragic, loving portrait of what a good relationship looks like under impossible strain. The Traveler is out now from Tor Books!