Afterlife with Archie #6

Betty: R.I.P.
Chapter One—"Witch in the Dream House"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie pulls off yet another storytelling sleight of hand, one that's obvious in its broadest strokes and, it seems, infinitely subversive in its most subtle.  Banished by her aunts Hilda and Zelda to the Netherworld for her theft of the Necronomicon and her resurrection of Hot Dog, Sabrina Spellman finds herself plunged into a world of nightmares, seemingly catching only glimpses of the horrors that surround her, and under the insidious "care" of her therapist Dr. Lovecraft.

Aguirre-Sacasa evokes one of the oldest and most effective horror tropes: the inability to trust oneself, one's memories, and one's own senses.  Her waking life is to her not unlike her nightmares, in which monsters flash out of familiar faces, shadows of true horrors slide out of the corner of her eyes, and ancient evils from the deep reach up to pull her under.  By the time the secrets of her committal become clear—a perverse and unsettlingly sexually threatening wedding to the risen Cthulhu himself—it could hardly be considered a surprise, no matter how eloquent and sinister the execution.

"Witch in the Dream House"'s sensibilities are pure Lovecraftian, almost on the nose.  But Afterlife with Archie slyly insinuates Sabrina Spellman (and the rest of Archie's crumbling world) into a dialogue of literature, playing characters from disparate worlds against one another.  "Witch in the Dream House" is so dense and rich with horror allusion, mostly but not exclusively Lovecraft, that I can hardly pretend to have caught them all.  As Sabrina converses with Erich Zann, the scope of Aguirre-Sacasa's vision is quite majestic.  Afterlife with Archie isn't about bringing horror to Riverdale; it's about seeing horror through Riverdale, a horror that Sabrina has invited through the front door.

It's quite impossible to over-praise Francavilla's artistic contributions to this horror.  He is able to cast a psychologically bleak pall even in his most winsome panels.  Sabrina's dream of beach bliss with her boyfriend Harvey, bleached with sunshine and bathed in warm colors, is defiled by the dark shadow of a mask obscuring his face, an ill omen of things to come.  By the time the beast emerges as a pre-Christian force of divinity and wonder and terror, Sabrina has become victim to these old, powerful archetypes.

[October 2014]