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once upon a time there was a comic called Pep, it was put out in 1939 and BECAUSE it was 1939 it starred a cadre of superheroes like The Shield, Hangman, The Web, & plenty of others
but as it always does time marched on and superheroes went out of vogue, the company that published Pep switched to romance comics & found great success with its character Archie Andrews, who first premiered in Pep
1966- the Fantastic Four basically reinvent the game of comics & superheroes are now in vogue, Archie Comics, who started with a humble little title called Pep! suddenly realizes they have a bunch of superheroes in their catalogue & so enter the Mighty Comics Group
this lasted for a few years before the characters slipped back into obscurity, skip ahead again to 1983, Superheroes are in vogue again after Superman 1979 becomes a huge smash, so someone at Archie decides to give this another go with Red Circle Comics
1992 and comics are undergoing a MASSIVE boom through the speculator bubble, super star artists, the Burton Batman comics, & the Image Comics birth, so DC partnered with Archie Comics to make Impact Comics, a unique imprint NOT part of their world
2010, someone at DC realizes they're still linked with these properties that are now MAYBE public domain so they launch a new Red Circle imprint, this time in canon with the DCUniverse
2012, Archie comics takes back their ownership of these characters with a new all-ages version of them still called Red Circle
2018, Archie revives the properties another time for a darker, stripped down, minimalist take on them called Dark Circle
2021, Archie Comics hires Rob Liefeld to revamp their classic heroes for the new age
