A Complete Guide to the Gangs of Riverdale

When Archie Comics first pitched a gritty, noir-tinged reimagining of its wholesome Riverdale gang back in 2017, nobody quite expected just how far “gritty” would actually go. Within two seasons, the sleepy small town that once revolved around Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe and the Blue and Gold student newspaper had somehow developed enough organized criminal infrastructure to rival a mid-size city. Biker gangs, drug-dealing street racers, masked cult followers, and at least one full-blown religious organization all called Riverdale home at some point, frequently at the exact same time.

It got to the point where the show’s own writers occasionally seemed to be running out of new configurations to throw at their long-suffering teenage protagonists. But the gangs of Riverdale, for all their soapy absurdity, became one of the defining structural elements of the entire series, shaping character arcs, driving entire seasons of plot, and giving Jughead Jones considerably more to worry about than his weekly newspaper deadline. Here is your complete guide.

The Southside Serpents

The Southside Serpents are the foundational gang of the entire series, and easily its most important. A criminal biker gang based on the poorer, more dangerous Southside of Riverdale, the Serpents deal in petty theft, protection rackets, and general intimidation, all while operating under a code of loyalty that gives the gang its emotional core. Led for most of the show’s run by FP Jones, proclaimed by his members as the “Serpent King,” the Serpents are the gang most directly tied to the show’s central cast: FP is Jughead Jones’s father, which means Jughead spends a significant portion of the series navigating his own complicated relationship to a gang his father built and once led.

Jughead’s own arc within the Serpents becomes one of the show’s most compelling throughlines. Rather than simply inheriting his father’s position, Jughead works his way up through the ranks the hard way, gaining more criminal responsibility and deeper knowledge of the gang’s inner workings as he goes, eventually becoming Serpent King himself. The gang’s structure is genuinely hierarchical, with initiation rituals, a clear chain of command, and an internal culture that the show treats with more procedural seriousness than you might expect from a series that also features literal cults and murder-solving teenagers.

The Serpents’ most consequential storyline in the early seasons involves Southside High School’s closure forcing Jughead and his fellow Serpents to transfer to Riverdale High, merging two schools that had previously existed as rival, class-divided institutions. That merger becomes a genuine engine for conflict, tension, and eventually solidarity across the show’s second season, and it is one of the clearest examples of how the show used its gang mythology to explore real class divisions within the town.

The Serpents also extend beyond Riverdale itself. FP’s ex-wife Gladys Jones starts an entirely separate Serpent chapter in Toledo, with brief mentions of another chapter operating in Canada, suggesting the Serpents function less as a single localized gang and more as a genuine, branching criminal network with Riverdale as just one node.

The Ghoulies

The Southside Serpents’ primary rivals, the Ghoulies are a considerably more ruthless and less code-bound gang, dealing hard drugs and racing cars for both profit and sport. Led for much of their run by a man named Malachai, the Ghoulies are characterized throughout the show as barbarous thugs willing to cheat, cut corners, and escalate violence in ways the more honor-bound Serpents generally avoid. They are even rumored, in one of the show’s more delightfully unhinged flourishes, to have committed cannibalism at some point.

The rivalry between the Ghoulies and the Serpents produces one of the show’s most memorable early set pieces: a street race between Archie and Jughead against Malachai and the Ghoulies, with the stakes explicitly tied to whether the Ghoulies would stop selling drugs at Southside High. The Ghoulies, naturally, cheat throughout the race, forcing Archie to intervene directly to stop things from ending in disaster.

Later in the series, after Malachai’s fall and with Serpent-turned-lawyer-turned-crime-boss Penny Peabody missing, the Ghoulies find themselves without clear leadership. It is during this leaderless period that a fantasy tabletop game called Gryphons and Gargoyles begins spreading through Riverdale’s youth, tied to a new street drug called Fizzle Rocks, and the majority of the Ghoulies’ remaining membership eventually defects entirely into an even stranger, more dangerous organization.

The Gargoyle Gang

Introduced in Season 3, the Gargoyle Gang is exactly as strange as its name suggests: a group of masked followers, hidden behind literal gargoyle masks, worshipping a mysterious figure known as the Gargoyle King and organizing their entire criminal structure around the fictional tabletop game Gryphons and Gargoyles. Jughead first encounters the gang deep in the forest, describing stumbling upon roughly ten masked figures who looked, in his words, like “a gang of gargoyles,” which gave the group its blunt, straightforward name.

The Gargoyle Gang’s membership draws heavily from the wreckage of the other two gangs. Former Serpent Joaquin DeSantos, who had left both juvenile detention and the Serpents behind, turns up as a confirmed member before eventually being killed. The gang’s overall structure suggests it absorbed considerable numbers from both the Serpents and the Ghoulies depending on where individual loyalties landed once the Gargoyle King began recruiting.

The central mystery of Season 3 revolves specifically around the Gargoyle King’s true identity, with the show deliberately teasing multiple possibilities. If FP Jones were unmasked as the King, it would suggest lingering Serpent loyalty to their former leader. If Penny Peabody were behind the mask, it would tie the gang directly back to the Ghoulies. Other suspects floated across the season included Hiram Lodge, Alice Cooper, and Edgar Evernever, each possibility carrying different implications for exactly which of Riverdale’s many criminal and cult factions the Gargoyle Gang actually represented. The Gargoyle Gang’s violence escalates considerably as the season progresses, including a direct attack on Reggie, Veronica, and Josie at the speakeasy La Bonne Nuit, before the Serpents intervene to protect their own. The gang is eventually dismantled after Fangs Fogarty infiltrates its ranks, leading to the King’s unmasking as Tall Boy, a former high-ranking Serpent whose betrayal recontextualized much of the season’s earlier tension.

The Red Circle and the Dark Circle

Before the show’s gang landscape became genuinely overcrowded, Archie Andrews briefly ran his own vigilante operations, first as the Red Circle and later reconstituted as the Dark Circle. Both groups were less organized criminal gangs and more informal, morally righteous vigilante squads, built around Archie’s specific brand of well-meaning but frequently reckless heroism. Neither group achieved the same lasting narrative weight as the Serpents, Ghoulies, or Gargoyle Gang, and both were eventually written out as defunct, but their existence says something important about the show’s broader thesis: in Riverdale, even the good guys eventually form a gang.

The Farm

Not a criminal gang in the traditional sense, but arguably one of the show’s most unsettling organizations, The Farm is a cult that infiltrates Riverdale during the show’s third season, led by the unnervingly serene Edgar Evernever. The Farm operates through manipulation, isolation, and the kind of soft-spoken menace that made it a genuinely different flavor of threat compared to the show’s biker gangs and masked cults. Its recruitment of major characters, including Alice Cooper and, for a time, Betty’s own family, gave the show a way to explore psychological manipulation and religious control alongside its more traditional gang warfare, and it remains one of the more effective slow-burn threats in the show’s run precisely because it never announced itself as dangerous the way a leather jacket or a gargoyle mask does.

The Comics Connection: Where the Serpents Actually Came From

While Riverdale’s version of the Southside Serpents is very much its own dark, dramatically heightened creation, the gang does have roots in the Archie Comics source material, where the Serpents existed as a much less violent, more classically “greaser” biker gang, positioned as a working-class rival group to the wealthier, more privileged Riverdale High crowd. The show’s writers took that basic class-divide premise, the Southside versus the Northside, the leather jackets versus the letterman jackets, and dramatically amplified it into the show’s central engine of conflict, turning a relatively minor comic book element into one of the defining structural pillars of the entire series.

That amplification is, in many ways, the whole Riverdale formula in miniature: take a wholesome, decades-old piece of Americana, and push its subtext so far into the foreground that it becomes text, violent, gothic, and completely, gloriously unhinged text.

Why Riverdale Kept Making More Gangs

It would be easy to read Riverdale’s ever-expanding roster of gangs, cults, and criminal factions as simple narrative excess, and to be fair, it frequently was exactly that. But there is a genuine thematic throughline underneath all the leather jackets and gargoyle masks: Riverdale, as a show, was always fundamentally interested in the idea that a small, seemingly wholesome American town is never actually as innocent as its diner jukeboxes and letterman jackets suggest. Every gang the show introduced was, in its own way, a literalization of that idea, taking the class tensions, generational trauma, and buried secrets that always existed under Riverdale’s surface and giving them a jacket, a mask, or a set of tarot cards to organize around.

It also, frankly, gave the show’s ensemble cast something to actually do. With Jughead as a Serpent, Archie running his own vigilante circles, and Betty and Veronica constantly getting pulled into whatever criminal or cult drama was currently escalating, the gangs of Riverdale functioned as the connective tissue holding the show’s increasingly baroque plotting together, season after season, gang after gang after gang.

Which Riverdale gang was your favorite, or the one you found the most ridiculous? Drop it in the comments.