Afterlife with Archie #1

written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

There's something perversely pleasing about the juxtaposition of Riverdale, comics' most wholesome small town, and a zombie apocalypse, and it makes Afterlife with Archie a genuine, if not a little morbid, delight.  Immortality is part and parcel of a world whose characters have been un-aging teenagers for many decades.  Bringing the End of the World to a world for which time is perpetually suspended is quietly brilliant.  Series writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and its always excellent artist Francesco Francavilla milk the irony of the concept to great satisfaction and fill it with love for pop horror history:  Nosferatu, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, their less credible but prolific sequels, and a wide range of classic monsters.  But ultimately, if Afterlife with Archie is to transcend its clever—but potentially gimmicky—premise, it has to bite, so to speak.  And that's where its creative team succeeds with such aplomb in its opening issue.

There is perhaps no more familiar heartbreak than a dead pet.  So when Jughead shows up at Sabrina Spellman's house in Greendale with a limp and bleeding Hot Dog, his devastation at her aunts' inability to save him is authentically painful.  It's no wonder that sympathetic Sabrina chooses to help him out, steals her aunts' Necronomicon, and raises his dead dog from beyond the grave.

The series may depend on a wicked delight in the tongue-in-cheek use of zombie clichés in Riverdale, but Aguirre-Sacasa and Francavilla don't shy away from Afterlife with Archie's horror elements.  The resurrection orchestrated by Sabrina and Jughead is eerie, her insistence that he alone dig Hog Dog's grave since "each buries his own" (Afterlife with Archie #1: 7) and their departure from the swamp in a grim and grey rainstorm.  Sabrina's punishment may be announced off-handedly and with not a little irony of its own—"I know a year seems like an awfully long time, little Ms. Raise-the-dead, but in truth...you won't miss anything" (9)—but it's quite sinister, despite her pleas banished by her skeletal and clawed aunts to the Nether-Realm with her mouth skinned over for "silent reflection".  In a scene that puts Cujo to shame, Hot Dog returns a possessed—or as it turns out, infected—beast.  And like that, Jughead becomes patient zero.

[December 2013]