Why aren’t you reading Afterlife with Archie?
Seriously, why not?
Is it the characters? For many,
Archie and pals have outlived their usefulness by the time they’ve stopped
getting dragged to the grocery store with their parents. Back when that flimsy
little digest filled with the exploits of Jughead, Betty, Veronica, and the
gang was the only reward immediately available after an endless half an hour of
picking out vegetables. In my experience working at a comic shop I’ve heard
many a comic fan decry Archie as something merely ‘for kids’, because mature
dark and gritty stories about colourful sexual superheroes beating on similarly
themed villains in increasingly elaborate ways is truly the epitome of adult
four-colour entertainment. Worse still, it isn’t uncommon to hear the cries of
a boy on the cusp of his teenage years tossing the Riverdale crew into the
mental wastebasket labelled ‘for girls.’
I’m here to tell you that all of
those thought processes are horribly, horribly, horribly wrong. Archie Comics (the publisher) is versatile and
accommodating to the reader. If you want your dose of wholesome family
entertainment that Archie is known for, then the flagship title has got your
back. If you want a dramatic story filled to the brim with romance, tragedy,
and alternate universe shenanigans then the wonderful Married Life with Archie magazine is right up your alley. What
everybody wants, even if they don’t think they want it, is to read Afterlife with Archie.
What could have easily been a
cheap cash-in on the current zombie craze dominating pop-culture ended up being
one of the very best comics on the market. Afterlife
is a serious horror story that happens to feature some of the most innocent and
well-loved characters in the history of American storytelling. Don’t be fooled
by the title or the silly premise, this book is scary. Sometimes the fear comes in a deeply unsettling way,
sometimes in a ‘pull the covers over your head and leave the lights on’
terrifying way. More than once I’ve closed the book in my hands and just sat
there staring at the back cover, trying to process what exactly I just read. In
my eight years of monthly comic reading I can’t remember more than a handful of
times a funny book has made my stomach sink like this wonderful, crazy,
unexpected adventure has.
However,
the true terror of Afterlife with Archie
is not found in the dark and detailed graphic imagery or the subtle and
effective storytelling. Afterlife
sinks its bloody claws into your brain through its perversion of Riverdale and
the reader’s expectations. Seeing a girl getting eaten by a zombie on its own
is not a scary concept anymore; we’ve seen it so many times that unless it’s
done horribly well we’ll probably end up laughing. Seeing a girl getting eaten
by a zombie is much different when both the girl and the zombie are characters
that have been around you your whole life, maybe even only peeking into the
corner of your eyes in that checkout line at the grocery store. It is so
shockingly abnormal to see these characters kill each other that it creates a
numbing effect of disbelief. Did I really just see Hotdog take a chunk out of
Jughead? Yes actually, you did, and how does it make you feel that you loved
seeing it?
As if the well executed horror
wasn’t enough, Afterlife twists the
iconic characters in even more, modernly relevant, ways. The never-ending
competition for Archie’s affections takes an interesting twist when both Betty
and Veronica are willing to escalate their attempts at snatching up Archie in
very ‘teenage’ ways. Sabrina and her world of magic crosses the line between Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Salem
Witch Trials when she’s casting spells out of the freaking Necronomicon.
Furthermore, this comic tastefully deals with such socially relevant or taboo
issues as incestual relationships, homosexuality and homophobia, teen sex,
mental insanity, and more only six
issues in.
Through its use of familiarity to
create horror, Afterlife with Archie
is the kind of story that could only work as a comic book. The pages in your
hands tell you a tale both familiar and alien. The Archie Comics experience is
somehow projected through the layers of blood, unconventional art, and mature
subject matter. This underlying ‘feel’ of Archie comics is what writer Roberto
Aguirre-Sacasa and artist Francesco Francavilla rely on to scare the pants off
of you, because no matter how hardcore this book can get, it still has an
unbelievably strange sense of comfort. Yes, I am claiming that the story of
teenagers getting torn apart physically, mentally, and emotionally is a
feel-good story. When I finish an issue, no matter how terrifying it may have
been, it still makes me smile. Every time I read Afterlife with Archie I’m brought back to those old days of being a
little kid and enjoying comics for what they were at face value, something
embodied for me by Archie and the gang. The way the book toys with the feelings
and understanding of the reader is masterful and something to be admired. This
is as close as it gets to crafting a perfect ‘classic’ comic book experience.
For you, the poor soul who hasn’t
enjoyed this comic yet, Afterlife with
Archie has only had six issues released so far and the first trade
paperback collecting five of those is readily available almost everywhere where
comics are sold. Issue six, the fan-favourite Sabrina issue, might be hard to
track down but I promise you it will be worth it. With an increasingly
Lovecraftian plotline and the promise of more classic monsters to come
terrorize the gang, now is the perfect time to get on this ride. I only have
one suggestion to anybody about to experience Afterlife with Archie: go down to the convenience store, grocery
store, comic store or wherever and pick up a copy of an Archie digest (my
personal favourite is Betty and Veronica
Double Digest since you might get two or three Sabrina the Teenage Witch
tales sandwiched between pages of hilarious love triangle hijinx). Trust me, it
makes the whole experience of gruesome death a lot better when you have a fresh
image in your mind of the classic comic exploits of Archie and pals.
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