Archie Comics Judgement Day #1, variant cover with artist Reiko Murakami
The last few weeks have seen various forms of turmoil at a number of comics publishers, and now Archie Comics has entered the chat. And spectacularly so.
An article at the website of fintech company 9fin has been quietly making the rounds in the last few days. Reported by Maria Heeter and Laurie Tomassian, the article lays out recent lawsuits and financial controversies at Archie Comics Publications. This article is very well written and researched and the underlying matters are quite complicated so Just Go Read The Article.
If you are in a rush, a (very) short version is that in 2022 Jonathan Goldwater, the co-owner of Archie, and grandson of the company’s co-founder, signed a deal with finance company Raven Capital, receiving a $40 million loan from them, and also signing an $80 million development deal giving former Raven principal and occasional movie producer James Masciello the right to develop “secondary Archie characters.”
Since then, Raven has been trying to get Goldwater to pay back the debt, and Masciello first fell out with Raven and then died suddenly. Raven sued Goldwater last October in an attempt to get payment, but they seem to have been particularly outraged by the August 2025 announcement that ACP had signed a deal with Universal for a new Archie movie with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Hail Mary Project) to direct, Tom King writing the screenplay, and Emma Watts producing. I’ll let 9fin explain what happened next:
Less than two months later, lenders from Raven Capital Management filed a lawsuit in New York Superior Court accusing Jonathan Goldwater — the son of an Archie Comics Publications founder and the company’s co-chief executive officer — of going behind Raven’s back to sell Universal the rights to Archie intellectual property. Goldwater’s lawyers fired back, accusing Raven of angling for control of one of the longest-running brands in comic book history just as Goldwater cinched a lucrative movie deal — and threatened to kick Goldwater out of a $5.7m Beverly Hills mansion a former Raven employee had promised years before. The dispute would become so ugly that Goldwater’s lawyers later described a phone call from Raven’s chief investment officer as having the tone of an “organized crime figure.”
Now the fight is coming to a head. In late May, Raven went on a new offensive, announcing a June UCC foreclosure auction for control of Goldwater’s family office — which includes a 25% stake in Archie Comics — at the Los Angeles offices of Paul Hastings, according to a classifieds notice in the Wall Street Journal. Goldwater is aware of the auction but hasn’t yet responded, according to a person familiar with the matter and public filings. If Raven seizes the stake through this auction, it could control the future of Archie Andrews and the Riverdale universe.
Ouch.
The 2022 deal at the heart of the dispute had a lot of moving parts:
He signed a sprawling deal with Raven Capital, a New York-based lender specializing in asset-backed deals, that had two parts: a $40m loan to help him simplify his trust’s capital structure, ensuring he had control over the trust’s 25% stake in Archie Comics, and a second agreement more akin to a movie deal. The loan was accompanied by a personal “bad boy” guaranty from Goldwater himself, which could make him personally liable for the loan if he engaged in certain acts.
Former Raven principal James Masciello, an investor who also moonlit as a movie producer, arranged a deal via a separate entity called 18D Media to acquire an option to develop Archie’s famous characters like Archie, Jughead, Josie and the Pussycats and Sabrina the Teenage Witch for $80m, and outright acquired an exclusive license to develop Archie’s lesser-known characters like the Mighty Crusaders, according to Goldwater’s lawyers. Raven would later dispute this, arguing that the exclusive license covered all of Archie’s characters from the outset.
The filings for this case are easily accessible online, but they are labyrinthine. Goldwater’s affidavit with his account of the case makes for interesting reading but unless you are a lawyer, it will definitely give you a headache with all the deals, undeals, subdeals, riders and redactions.
I’ll tell you one thing, however, whenever the name “Mighty Crusaders” rears its head, you know there is going to be trouble. Aside from partially inspiring the Watchmen, it’s one of those long-lost to most but fondly remembered to a few properties that people try to revive for no discernible reason other than the hope for a nostalgia that only exists in their head. It’s no T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, but it doesn’t bode well.
The Archie characters are the real deal, though. While Goldwater clashed with co-owner Nancy Silberkleit, he undeniably modernized the franchise over the last 15 years or so, both with relevant storylines – Kevin Keller, Life with Archie (in which he marries both Betty and Veronica Sliding Doors style) – and with bold new directions – Afterlife with Archie. And the media spin-offs were remarkable. Riverdale was a CW hit that ran for seven increasingly wild seasons, and continues to be popular on Netflix. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina ran for two seasons and Katy Keene for one, so certainly the idea of an A-list movie adaptation makes sense given the incredibly durable nature of the characters. Archie and his friends are among the most recognized comic book characters ever, and their idyllically humorous view of teen life is an enduring trope that can be endlessly reinvented.
Where does this leave all things Archie? While the litigation is still going full throttle, should Raven prevail they could take over Goldwater’s 50% stake in the company. The rest is held by Nancy Silberkleit. (A brief history: the company was founded in 1939 by Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John L. Goldwater. At some point it was taken public, but after the original John Goldwater retired, the company was re-aquired by his son Richard Goldwater and Louis’s son Michael Silberkleit. Nancy Silberkleit is Michael’s widow, and the current Jonathan Goldwater is Richard’s son.)
If Raven does get control, it would be yet another legacy comics publisher being taken over by private equity, although Raven would probably quickly flip their shares – if they could find a buyer. Among all the filings it is revealed that Goldwater attempted to sell Archie related assets in both 2023 and 2024, but no deal could be reached.
As the 9fin article points out, all of this legal wrangling would doubtless have a chilling effect (and not in the Sabrina sense) on the development of the Universal Archie movie – the tangled webs of old deals and rights issues has quashed many a comics based movie project over the years.
The most exciting current Archie project – Oni’s licensed reboot – is most likely not affected by all this, as it was a publishing deal, and doesn’t seem to have come up in all the filings. But this would also explain why Archie is licensing out its characters. (I’m told Oni was not the only company that was interested in the Riverdale crew.)
Archie’s current publishing output is quite small, but they are still plugging away, as with their new character, the soccer player Eternity Fields, just in time for the World Cup.
There is one more curious sidenote, perhaps mainly of interest to me. The announcement of the Archie movie deal came a few weeks after I reported that Archie was ceasing publication of its long running digests. It was suggested to me at the time that the timing was not coincidental. Along those lines, the 9fin article has been circulating among comics folks over the last week or so – and just last week Archie had another announcement: a historical pirate comic put together by Shaquille O’Neal’s company. I found it rather odd that the announcement didn’t include any art – perhaps it was rushed out to get ahead of the wider distribution of the 9fin story.
At the end of all this, I’m reminded of The Big Lie – the idea that making media deals for comics properties is a sound business model for a publishing company. It is not. The Archie characters DO retain a lot of value though, and I imagine that however long it takes, once the legal battle is settled we’ll see Archie somewhere on a screen large or small.
That said, $40 million is a very big loan!!! Where did all that money go? How did Goldwater think he was going to make enough money to pay it back? And who will end up owning Archie Comics? More to come on all this for sure.
