⚡ Quick answer

Archie Comics is one of the oldest American publishers still in operation. Founded in 1939 as MLJ Magazines by Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John L. Goldwater, the publisher debuted Archie Andrews in Pep Comics #22 (December 1941). The catalog includes Betty & Veronica, Jughead, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Archie's Madhouse #22, October 1962). In 2013, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla's horror reboot Afterlife with Archie reignited collector interest. 2026 value: Pep Comics #22 in CGC 7.0+ runs €50,000 to €200,000.

When the conversation turns to historic American comic book publishers, attention naturally gravitates to Timely, DC, EC, Fawcett, or Gold Key. Yet Archie Comics, founded as MLJ in 1939, holds a singular place: 87 years of unbroken existence, a catalog built around teen comedy that has weathered every era, and a central character (Archie Andrews, Pep Comics #22, December 1941) who has been in continuous publication ever since. For the collector raised on Marvel and DC superheroes, Archie offers an entry point that is both less crowded and packed with key issues whose values followed a spectacular trajectory between 2018 and 2026.

This article traces Archie Comics' publishing history from MLJ Magazines in 1939, details the catalog (Archie, Betty & Veronica, Jughead, Sabrina the Teenage Witch), revisits Archie's first appearance in Pep Comics #22, then Sabrina's debut in Archie's Madhouse #22 from October 1962. We then analyze the impact of the 2013+ horror reboot Afterlife with Archie on the collector market, and we deliver a 2026 value grid by grade for the major key issues. To place Archie within its Golden and Silver Age publishing ecosystem, several pillar guides round out this dossier.

Archie Comics since 1939: the MLJ Magazines foundation

Archie Comics' history officially begins in 1939, in the wake of the boom sparked by Action Comics #1 (June 1938) and the birth of Superman. That year, three New York partners launched MLJ Magazines, an acronym formed from their first initials: Maurice Coyne (handling finances), Louis Silberkleit (a magazine distributor already active at Eastern Color), and John L. Goldwater (publisher and longtime future president). The company set up at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan, in the industrial district where most comic book packagers were then concentrated.

The initial editorial line from 1939 to 1941 followed the trend of the day: patriotic superheroes and costumed characters. MLJ published Blue Ribbon Comics (November 1939, its first title), Top-Notch Comics (December 1939), Pep Comics (January 1940), and Zip Comics (February 1940). The catalog welcomed heroes such as The Shield (Pep Comics #1, January 1940), the first American patriotic superhero, predating Timely's Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) by fourteen months. This historical precedence is documented throughout the Golden Age literature and remains one of MLJ's selling points for specialist collectors. To gauge this landscape of emerging rival publishers, see our Timely Comics 1939-1949 collector's guide.

The editorial turning point came in late 1941. John L. Goldwater returned from a trip where he had observed the success of teen comedies at the movies (MGM's Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney had been a hit since 1937). Goldwater tasked writer Vic Bloom and artist Bob Montana with developing a freckled, redheaded teenager torn between two girls: a dominant brunette (Veronica Lodge) and a sweet blonde (Betty Cooper). The concept was meant to embody the American teen ideal, a blend of comedy, romance, and everyday high school life. The first appearance was slated for Pep Comics #22, cover-dated December 1941.

MLJ officially adopted the name Archie Comic Publications in 1946, gradually abandoning superheroes in favor of the character who now carried the publisher. This 1939-1946 pivot is crucial for the collector: the MLJ superheroes of 1939-1945 (The Shield, The Black Hood, The Hangman, Steel Sterling, The Wizard) remain lightly collected in France but represent a Golden Age segment at values still reasonable compared with the Timely or DC equivalents of the same period.

Archie Andrews' first appearance: Pep Comics #22, December 1941

Pep Comics #22 (cover-dated December 1941, hitting newsstands in late November 1941) is today considered one of the major non-superhero Golden Age books. The issue is a 64-page anthology featuring the usual adventures of The Shield and The Hangman, in which Archie Andrews appears in a short story by Vic Bloom (script) and Bob Montana (art). The character is not on the cover of #22; his first Archie cover on Pep Comics comes with #36 (February 1943).

The plot of the original story is minimal: Archie, a clumsy Riverdale high schooler, meets Betty Cooper, his new neighbor. He stumbles from one blunder to the next trying to impress her and get her to sign his class notebook. Jughead Jones is already present as Archie's best friend from this very first appearance (Pep Comics #22 therefore also marks Jughead's first appearance, a point often overlooked that adds to the issue's historical value). Veronica Lodge appears only later, in Pep Comics #26 (April 1942).

On the technical side, Pep Comics #22 had a print run of roughly 250,000 to 400,000 copies (per Heritage Auctions and the Gerber Photo-Journal Guide), a standard run for an MLJ title of the era. The paper is acidic pulp that browns severely after 80 years. The cover shows The Shield and The Hangman fighting Nazis (the United States officially entered the war on December 8, 1941, just after the issue reached newsstands). This patriotic wartime cover, with no mention of Archie at all, is also what makes the issue hard to spot for unaware bargain hunters: copies long circulated for a few dollars in Golden Age lots before the market fully recognized the value of the Archie first appearance.

High-grade rarity is extreme. The 2026 CGC census records fewer than 250 graded copies across all grades, and fewer than 15 copies in CGC 8.0 or higher. Current values reflect that scarcity: a CGC 7.0 trades between €50,000 and €80,000 on Heritage Auctions and ComicConnect, a CGC 8.0 between €90,000 and €140,000, and a CGC 8.5 or 9.0 can exceed €200,000 at open auction. The documented record at Heritage Auctions is a CGC 9.0 sold for $167,300 in 2017, a price that would have been comfortably surpassed in 2024-2025 on a comparable copy. To understand the auction mechanics behind these prices, see our comparison of ComicConnect vs Heritage Auctions.

The Archie catalog: Betty, Veronica, Jughead, the Silver Age pillars

From 1942 onward, Archie Comics expanded its catalog around the central character. This expansion created the cornerstone titles every Archie collector needs to know in order to read the values correctly.

Archie Comics (the eponymous title, launched in the winter of 1942, the first comic book entirely devoted to a teenage character in the medium's history). #1 (Winter 1942-1943) is valued between €40,000 and €90,000 in CGC 6.0-7.0, more attainable than Pep Comics #22 but already firmly positioned in the premium Golden Age market. The title then ran through #666 in 2015, before being relaunched with the Mark Waid reboot (volume 2, July 2015), renumbered from #1 to #32 (August 2018).

Betty and Veronica (launched in 1950, originally Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica). #1 (March 1950) is valued between €6,000 and €12,000 in CGC 7.0-8.0. The series would become central to teenage girl readers from the 1950s through the 1990s and remains a segment where high-grade copies are relatively affordable compared with pure Archie books.

Jughead (launched in 1949 as Archie's Pal Jughead). #1 (1949) is valued between €4,500 and €9,000 in CGC 7.0-8.0. Jughead occupies a singular place in pop culture: since 2015, his asexual identity has become canon (introduced by Chip Zdarsky in Jughead volume 3, October 2015), which has revived collector interest in early Silver Age Jughead books.

Laugh Comics (1946, becoming the alternate Archie backbone) and Pep Comics (which continued through #411 in 1987) round out the ecosystem of original series. Life with Archie (launched in 1958) and Archie at Riverdale High (1972) add narrative angles (drama, slice of life) that broadened the readership.

The Archie catalog's defining economic trait is its print longevity: during the 1960s-1980s, several Archie titles sold in supermarkets and drugstores in the Archie Digest format, with combined monthly runs topping 1.5 million copies. This mass distribution created an abundance of mid-grade copies (raw VG to FN) on the secondary market, and paradoxically makes high-grade copies (CGC 9.6+) rare for most issues. For the general arbitrage dynamic between raw and CGC on Golden and Silver Age books like Archie, see our CGC vintage vs modern: strategy dossier.

Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Archie's Madhouse #22, October 1962

The first appearance of Sabrina Spellman, a.k.a. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in Archie's Madhouse #22 (cover-dated October/November 1962) is the second-most valuable and speculatively important Archie key issue. The character was created by George Gladir (script) and Dan DeCarlo (art), both major names in the Archie catalog since the 1950s. Sabrina is conceived as a teenage witch living in Greendale, raised by her aunts Hilda and Zelda, two more experienced witches, and her talking cat Salem.

Archie's Madhouse began as a humorous anthology title launched in 1959 to publish parodies and short stories that didn't fit elsewhere in the Archie line. The October 1962 #22 ran Sabrina in a short story without putting her on the cover (the #22 cover shows a generic humorous parody). As with Pep Comics #22, this absence from the cover long masked the issue's historical value from unaware bargain hunters.

Sabrina gradually became a recurring character in the title, then landed her own solo book: Sabrina the Teenage Witch #1 (April 1971), which today is valued between €800 and €2,500 in CGC 8.0-9.0. The character exploded into mainstream popular culture with the ABC sitcom Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, which aired from 1996 to 2003 with Melissa Joan Hart, then with the Netflix horror reboot Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020) starring Kiernan Shipka, based on Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's horror comic series launched in 2014.

This dual TV adaptation shaped the modern value of Archie's Madhouse #22. The issue was estimated under $200 in CGC 7.0 in the Overstreet guides of the 1990s. With the Netflix horror reboot announced in 2017, values saw a first wave: a CGC 7.0 climbed from $800 to $2,200 between 2017 and 2018. The current 2026 value sits between €4,000 and €8,000 in CGC 7.0-8.0, and between €12,000 and €22,000 in CGC 9.0-9.4. Scarcity at the CGC 9.6+ level makes premium copies highly speculative: fewer than 8 copies in CGC 9.6 or higher are recorded in the 2026 CGC census.

For collectors anticipating a third Sabrina media wave (a potential new streaming adaptation, or an Archieverse crossover), Archie's Madhouse #22 remains one of the best-positioned Silver Age sleeper books. See our undervalued comics 2026: sleeper issues dossier for the full list of comparable Silver Age books.

Afterlife with Archie 2013+: the horror reboot that revived the market

October 2013 marked an absolute turning point in the collector perception of Archie Comics. The publisher released #1 of Afterlife with Archie, a horror reboot of the Archie catalog written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (then Archie Comics' chief creative officer and future showrunner of Riverdale on The CW starting in 2017) and drawn by Francesco Francavilla, an Italian artist renowned for his work on Black Beetle at Dark Horse and his covers for DC and Marvel.

The premise: a zombie epidemic ravages Riverdale after Jughead, devastated by the death of his dog Hot Dog, begs Sabrina the Teenage Witch to bring him back to life. Sabrina relents, but the ritual goes wrong and turns Hot Dog into a zombie dog that bites Jughead at a Halloween party. From there, Riverdale gradually descends into horror, with Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, Kevin, and Sabrina facing a zombie apocalypse. The title is explicitly labeled For Mature Readers, not subject to the Comics Code Authority (which Archie Comics had left in 2011).

The commercial and cultural impact of Afterlife with Archie #1 quickly outpaced expectations. The issue was reprinted four times in six months (4 documented prints between October 2013 and April 2014). The first print (cover A by Francesco Francavilla) instantly became a collectible: its 2014 value ranged between $30 and $80 in raw NM, reaching €250-400 in CGC 9.8 by 2018, and sitting in 2026 between €350 and €650 in CGC 9.8 on Heritage Auctions and eBay sold listings.

Beyond the collectible itself, Afterlife with Archie reintroduced Archie Comics into the adult collector market. Before 2013, most American comic collectors saw Archie as a peripheral kids' publisher. After 2013, the publisher drew readers used to sophisticated horror comics (Image, Vertigo, Dark Horse) and created an Archie Horror imprint that would publish Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack, 2014), Jughead: The Hunger (Frank Tieri, 2017), Vampironica (Greg and Megan Smallwood, 2018), and Blossoms 666 (Cullen Bunn, 2019).

The second effect was retroactive on the historic catalog. Between 2013 and 2017, the value of Archie Golden and Silver Age key issues rose by 60 to 200% depending on the issue, driven by the new wave of adult collectors discovering the catalog through Aguirre-Sacasa. The value of Pep Comics #22, which had topped out around $30,000 to $40,000 in CGC 7.0 in 2012, reached $80,000 to $100,000 in CGC 7.0 by 2018. This adaptation-effect mechanism is documented more broadly in our 1950s Pre-Code horror comics: collector's guide dossier, which shows that this dynamic is not specific to Archie but recurs systematically whenever a license resurfaces through an adult lens.

For modern collectors, Afterlife with Archie remains one of the best-positioned modern comics for a long hold. The complete run 1-10 (2013-2016; the planned #11 never shipped, as Francavilla and Aguirre-Sacasa moved straight on to Riverdale and Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) in CGC 9.8 first prints represents an investment of €1,500 to €2,800, reasonable for a culturally significant heritage object.

📚
The Archie, MLJ, and Sabrina catalog in My Comics Collection
Pep Comics, Archie's Madhouse, Afterlife with Archie: 1,000+ series integrated with live CGC and raw valuation. Centralize your Archie collection and get value alerts.
Try free for 14 days →
✓ No credit card · ✓ Cancel in one click · ✓ 1,000+ active collectors

2026 values: price grid by grade for the Archie key issues

Below is the 2026 value summary for the main Archie Comics key issues, cross-referenced across Heritage Auctions sold listings (last 12 months), ComicConnect, eBay sold completed listings, and the 2025-2026 Overstreet guides. The ranges are indicative and vary with the quality of the CGC label (presence of a Signature Series, encapsulation quality, off-white vs cream pages).

Pep Comics #22 (December 1941), first appearance of Archie Andrews and Jughead Jones:

Archie Comics #1 (Winter 1942-1943), the first Archie solo title:

Archie's Madhouse #22 (October 1962), first appearance of Sabrina the Teenage Witch:

Sabrina the Teenage Witch #1 (April 1971), the first Sabrina solo:

Afterlife with Archie #1 first print (October 2013), Francavilla cover:

To dig deeper into the broader dynamic of the most valuable comics in 2026, see our guide to the most expensive comics in 2026. For a personalized estimate of your Archie comic, you can also request our free appraisal service. Every title mentioned is cataloged in our comic series database: see the comic series index to explore Pep Comics, Archie Comics, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the entire historic and modern Archie catalog.

The sensible 2026 buying strategy for getting into Archie without an unlimited budget is threefold. First angle, the most accessible: the Sabrina the Teenage Witch 1971-1983 run (Volume 1) in raw VG-FN at €30 to €120 per issue, a complete 77-issue series for €2,500 to €4,500 over 12-18 months. Second angle: Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina first prints in CGC 9.8, for a total budget of €2,000 to €3,500, modern exposure with strong upside. Third angle: a single Archie's Madhouse #22 in CGC 7.0-8.0, as a central heritage key issue, for €4,000 to €9,500, which will be the centerpiece of a serious Archie collection.

Frequently asked questions

What is the first comic where Archie Andrews appears?

Archie Andrews makes his very first appearance in Pep Comics #22, cover-dated December 1941, published by MLJ Magazines (the future Archie Comic Publications). The 6-page short story is written by Vic Bloom and drawn by Bob Montana. The issue also contains the first appearance of Jughead Jones, Archie's best friend, which makes it a double key issue. Veronica Lodge appears only from Pep Comics #26 in April 1942. The cover of Pep Comics #22 does not show Archie but rather The Shield and The Hangman fighting Nazis, which makes the issue hard to identify for non-specialist bargain hunters. Its 2026 value ranges from €18,000 in CGC 3.0 to over €200,000 in CGC 8.5-9.0.

Why was MLJ Magazines renamed Archie Comics in 1946?

MLJ officially adopted the name Archie Comic Publications in 1946 because the character of Archie Andrews, launched in Pep Comics #22 in December 1941, had become within five years the central character and the main economic engine of the publisher. Sales of the teen comedy series (Archie Comics, Pep Comics with Archie on the cover from 1943, Laugh Comics) had far surpassed those of MLJ's original patriotic superhero series like The Shield, The Hangman, or Steel Sterling. The publisher gradually abandoned the superhero segment between 1944 and 1946 to focus exclusively on teen comedy. This specialization explains the publisher's unique longevity, having remained in continuous operation since 1939 without any major interruption.

Did Sabrina the Teenage Witch really first appear in 1962?

Yes. Sabrina Spellman, a.k.a. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, makes her first appearance in Archie's Madhouse #22, cover-dated October-November 1962, created by George Gladir on script and Dan DeCarlo on art. The character is introduced as a teenage witch living in Greendale with her aunts Hilda and Zelda and her cat Salem. Sabrina becomes recurring in Archie's Madhouse, then lands her own solo title Sabrina the Teenage Witch #1 in April 1971. The dual TV adaptation effect (the ABC sitcom 1996-2003 with Melissa Joan Hart, then Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix 2018-2020 with Kiernan Shipka) shaped the modern value of #22, which in 2026 sits between €4,000 and €6,500 in CGC 7.0, and between €12,000 and €16,000 in CGC 9.0.

Is Afterlife with Archie 2013 really worth collecting in CGC?

Yes, for the first print cover A by Francavilla. Released in October 2013, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and drawn by Francesco Francavilla, this horror reboot of the Archie catalog reintroduced the publisher into the adult collector market and triggered a retroactive revaluation of the Golden and Silver Age Archie key issues. The first print in CGC 9.8 trades between €350 and €650 on Heritage Auctions and eBay in 2026, versus $30-80 in raw NM at release. The issue was reprinted four times in six months, which makes first prints distinguishable by the indicia numbering. For a modern collector, it is one of the best-positioned comics for a long hold, provided you target strictly the first print in CGC 9.6 or 9.8.

What budget should you plan to get into Archie Comics in 2026?

Three budget profiles are rational. Discovery profile (€500 to €1,500): a complete Sabrina the Teenage Witch 1971-1983 run in raw VG-FN, plus 5-10 Afterlife with Archie in raw NM. Intermediate profile (€3,000 to €6,000): adding an Archie's Madhouse #22 in CGC 5.0 or 6.0, plus several CGC 9.8 modern Archie Horror imprint books. Heritage profile (€15,000 and up): an Archie's Madhouse #22 in CGC 7.0-8.0 as the central key issue, plus the option to consider a Pep Comics #22 in CGC 3.0-4.0 for the largest budgets. Sensible buying discipline means avoiding media spikes (streaming adaptation announcements) and favoring the slow periods of January-February and June-July, when eBay sold values are 10 to 20% lower.

Related articles