Review— Kevin Smith Presents: Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob

The first page of Kevin Smith Presents: Archie Meets Jay & Silent Bob tricks you into thinking that Smith may be going somewhere with this story.  Taking place after his movie Clerks 3 where the Quick Stop clerks had to wrestle with their mortality, this issue opens with Randall Graves deciding that he should spend some time outside of his store so he needs to hire a new convenience store clerk.  There’s something there, particularly if you’ve followed Smith’s Viewaskew movies and watched these characters over the past 30 years.  Not to say that Clerks 2 or Clerks 3 are any kind of great movies but you can see Smith trying to do something in those movies to talk about aging and caring for ourselves.  And the first page of this crossover seems to pick up on that and maybe try to follow some of those threads here.  And that’s giving Kevin Smith way too much credit.  

This isn’t a Clerks comic.  It states right up there that this is Archie meeting Jay & Silent Bob, Smith’s stone alter ego for himself and Jason Mewes.  That in itself implies something.  And this being a crossover, the applicant for that new clerk position is none other than Archie Andrews of Archie and Jughead, Archie and Betty, and Archie and Veronica.  You know, the squeaky clean teens from Riverdale who are about 30 years older than Smith is.  Archie’s world is full of school, malt shops, and trying to figure out which girl to date.  Maybe that’s what Smith’s work is also about but it’s influenced much more by dick and fart jokes than Archie ever dared to be.  And this may be the comic that introduces marijuana to Riverdale.  

Penciler Fernando Ruiz and inker Rich Koslowski do a fantastic job of bringing the two worlds of New Jersey and Riverdale together.  The book follows the Archie model and welcomes Smith’s ensemble and settings to that world.  Ruiz and Koslowski get to play a lot in this book, bouncing off the script that’s being fairly transgressive for an Archie comic without feeling like they are crossing any kind of boundary.  It’s a gentle melding of these two worlds that allows Archie and Jughead to share the stage with Jay and Silent Bob. 

That allows Smith to bring the Archie crew down to his level without ever having them partake in the more lewd elements of it.  They’re the tourists in this story Smith’s characters overpower Archie’s sweet innocence.  And yet, for all of the dick and fart jokes, the true Archie characters come out of this relatively unscathed.  Apparently, Riverdale has some killer weed that’s too much for Jay and Silent Bob but it’s not like the Archie characters ever partake in it.  

So why does this comic exist?  In the end, this isn’t so much a story but a Saturday Night Live skit, as if some late-night writing session led to a Kevin Smith-hosted episode where for 5 minutes between commercial breaks these two worlds collided.  But that’s all there is to this comic— an idea, some jokes, two worlds colliding, the audience laughs a bit (maybe nervously at one or two of the jokes,) and then it will be forgotten after the next skit.  Maybe if we’re lucky, it will be the musical guest or Weekend Update.  There’s some fun to be had here, particularly if you’re up on your Kevin Smith lore but… yeah… it’s a comic that exists in 2025.  What more can or really needs to be said about it than that?