Afterlife with Archie #4

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Four—"Archibald Rex"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie broke my heart, and it's as if it barely had to try.  Death is inevitable in a zombie story, I suppose, and Aguirre-Sacasa has already proven himself more than willing to make fatal choices even for the most popular and ubiquitous of Archie characters.  But, dammit, why the dog?!

Mr. Andrews:  "And this is how it works.  You take care of Vegas, when he's sick or needs help...  ...he'll do the same for you, without even thinking about it."  (Afterlife with Archie #4: 6)

Except the painful truth is, Fred Andrews underestimates Vegas.  Aguirre-Sacasa's terse mind-dialogue for Vegas is beautifully and achingly sincere, the knowing and unhesitating self-sacrifice of a most loyal pet.  Vegas's soulful eyes plead with both Archie and the viewer out of Francavilla's tight close-up of his already bloody face:  "(THANKYOU--LOVEYOU--FOREVER--)" (7).  Really, few humans die with that kind of dignity and love.

But, tears notwithstanding—real tears that I don't give up that easily—, Vegas's death is only a prelude to the issue's more traumatic loss.  We fear death, but we fear what we may also lose to death, those people we would die to save.  Archie's decision to leave Lodge Manor in search of his parents is perhaps foolhardy—a risk his parents, no doubt, would never want him to take—but it's also profoundly human, the need to rescue the ones you love whatever the danger.  And holed up outside of town, the refugees risk ignorance in their isolation.  For Archie, it seems, everywhere he finds reminders of just how much he has already lost.  The car:  a project he shared with his father for years, a painful token of his father's death and his own responsibility in the destruction of his body, but also his father's last gift of escape, the last chance he has to save his son and his wife even after he dies.

[April 2014]