Afterlife with Archie #7

Betty:  R.I.P.
Chapter Two—"Dear Diary…"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

The rivalry between Betty and Veronica, as iconic as it has come to be and as painfully familiar as it may be for many girls, is a hard sell if we're expected to like these characters all that much.  Their particular brand of girl-on-girl on-and-off-again hate that gravitates around the romantic affections of a boy can be excruciatingly demeaning, both parties devolving into cattiness and passive-aggressive backstabbing to sabotage the other.  That Aguirre-Sacasa doesn't let his characters off easily with such behavior is a remarkably redeeming quality of Afterlife with Archie, even if (perhaps because) it doesn't entirely recuperate its leading ladies.

The voice of "Dear Diary…" is Betty's, her feeble—if noble—attempt at documenting the zombie apocalypse in the genre of teen-girl journaling.  Betty's relentlessly well-meaning and generally self-effacing, though it is refreshing to see her stand up for herself to Veronica later in the issue, but she's as pampered and privileged as the ultra-rich Veronica Lodge, in her own way.  Her troublesome older sister Polly, whose less coddled perspective gives her a more acute social insight, bears the brunt of inequitable sibling expectation.  Polly, like Veronica, may be trouble, but she's a great deal more fiery and gripping than her younger good-girl sister.  When she confronts her twelve-year-old sister about her new birthday present diary, Polly's mostly not all that wrong that she "never [does] anything remotely interesting -- -- so why would anyone want to read about [her] boring life?" (Afterlife with Archie #7: 2).  For her part, Veronica plays the rich bitch with expertise.  She's the mean-girl queen bee in high school; she's the jealous, spiteful rival in the apocalypse.  When Archie and Betty seem to spark up a semi-clandestine romance on the run, Veronica allows herself to lose all perspective.


In the shadow of their bitter threesome, the horror around them continues to threaten.  The fugitive survivors, at Archie's insistence, to take a moment to acknowledge the dead, to say goodbye to the friends and family they've already lost before continuing their pilgrimage to the CDC center in Pittsburgh.  Even that is interrupted by a zombie "horde" led by "Jugdead".  Dilton's the resident expert on "crypto-science," because why wouldn't he be?  Kevin becomes preocuppied with giving the supernatural phenomenon its own lexicon worthy of its pulpy gravity.  Hiram becomes increasingly resentful at Archie's leadership of the group, and he's never much liked him anyway.  They avoid other survivors, because in this new savage world, they don't know that they can trust anyone else.

They may not even be able to trust each other.  The Blossoms have always been a dark, unsettling part of the Archie world, but in Aguirre-Sacasa's hands they've become sinister.  It seems that in recalling a strange Blossom Thanksgiving and the death of her puppy, she finally puts two and two together, recognizing Jason's manipulative need for co-dependence and jealousy.  Then they're interrupted by a wandering zombie.  What ensues happens unseen, but Cheryl re-emerges covered in blood, brandishing her machete, and insisting she be called "Blaze".  Betty suspects she's killed her brother.

[February 2015]

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]

Afterlife with Archie #5

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Five—"Exodus"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Maybe it's being confined in Lodge Manor like too many tigers in a pen, or maybe it's the short emotional fuses that come with living through a zombie apocalypse, but Riverdale's refugees are on an narrow path to romantic detonation in Afterlife with Archie #5.

Feeling betrayed and dismissed, Ginger is understandably frustrated by her closeted lover's receptivity to her longtime boyfriend's consolation and affection, but she's unreasonably hostile to clueless Chuck's desire to be alone with Nancy.  Nancy's devastated by the crisis but simultaneously cowardly and selfish for refusing to break it off with Chuck even if she chooses not to tell him she's been having an affair with Ginger.  Reggie's bullishly malicious to dead crush Midge, whom he egotistically and hard-heartedly snarks deserves her fate for preferring Moose over himself.  And when Kevin offers a friendly and compassionate gesture, Reggie erupts with a bitter, misguided, and homophobic barb, for which he receives a well-deserved punch.  Cheryl's up to her typical sexual manipulations, incestuously teasing her brother Jason by shamelessly imposing on Dilton in his bedroom.  And, of course, Veronica sparks the same old jealous rivalry when she discovers Archie has sought comfort from Betty instead, and always looking for an advantage over her competition, Betty doesn't waste the opportunity to further ingratiate herself into Archie's romantic sympathies.

Despite their collectively callous amorous machinations, in then end they're all saved by philandering Hiram Lodge's somewhat loving but mostly guilt-inspired and begrudging dedication to his dead wife's public generosity, an irony that Lodge butler Smithers is keen to note.  Indeed, Smithers' mute devotion to Hermione and Veronica Lodge lures some suspicion.

In its short run, Afterlife with Archie has so far proven itself willing to engage many of Riverdale's more subversive subtexts.  Transforming typically boy-crazy Ginger and Nancy into confused, frustrated, and closeted lovers with a decidedly rougher gay experience than Kevin certainly ups their stakes as characters.  Cheryl and Jason Blossom's codependent manipulations edge closer and closer to incest.  But "Exodus" plants suggestions of a possible affair between Hubert H. Smithers and Hermione Lodge.  The butler has always been quietly paternal to Veronica, here at the deathbed pleading of Hermione.  His sole presence at her birth, and possibly the suspiciously early date of her delivery, as well as Hermione's informal address of Smithers as "Hubert" as he held her for the first time, add up to a far more familial tableau than anything Afterlife with Archie has yet to provide for Hiram and Veronica.  Smithers is a shadowy—and not a little creepy—wallflower in Lodge Manor, but it imposes him on the life and death of Hermione and the birth and childhood of Veronica in ways that pushes Hiram to the edges.  The details are neither original nor conclusive, but their cumulation in a single issue is pointed.

Afterlife with Archie #5 takes a small step back, but after "Archibald Rex" how could it not?  The interesting question is:  it only took five issues to force Archie and his fellow survivors to leave Riverdale; will they ever be able to come back?

[July 2014]

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]

Afterlife with Archie #3

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Three—"Sleepover"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Much of the emerging horror potential of the zombie premise is the unrelenting possibility that not only might you lose the people closest to you, but that they might turn against you:  your family, your friends, your lover, your family pet.  In the immediate aftermath of Riverdale's zombie outbreak, Hiram Lodge shelters several of his daughter's friends, refugees from the school dance.  Even as he dreams, his dead wife, once a reliable source of common sense and level-headedness, turns into the walking dead, despite there being no indication that further dead can rise.  But this is his nightmare. 

For Moose, it's his lover.  Teased at the conclusion of last month's issue, one of the refugee high-schoolers was infected during their escape:  Midge.  I'd like to take her at her word—i.e., that she honestly didn't know when or by whom she got scratched, that her declaration of love to Moose was motivated by the end-of-the-world circumstances rather than knowledge of her looming zombie transformation, and that her secrecy about her injury was more about repressing the possibility in her own mind than deceiving and endangering her friends—but the potential for willful deceit is never entirely dispelled.  That potential is disquieting.

Archie too finds himself anxious for his loved ones and willing to leave the relative security of Lodge Manor to check on them.  It's a reckless response to his worry, one worthy of Afterlife with Archie's horror predecessors:  young people making stupid decisions.  And while it's unlikely even in a series which has proven itself willing to kill off main characters at a break-neck pace that Archie will die, his return home is ominous as he's greeted by his own dog Vegas now similarly infected.

While Afterlife with Archie continues to sustain a darkly ironic humor—e.g., Smithers with an axe announcing to Mr. Lodge that "'Operation Lockdown' proceeds apace" (Afterlife with Archie #3: 6)—it also continues to be a sobering character-driven portrait of small-town life in a crisis.  Archie, as always foolish, bull-headed, and generously concerned with others, leaves Lodge Manor to help his parents, heedless of their unspoken but no less obvious parental wishes that he keep himself safe even at their own expense.  Betty and Veronica both retreat—Veronica to the pool, Betty to the library—for distractions and a telling sense of safety.  Ultimately, Betty's choice may seem less insensitive to the situation, but Midge and Moose's transformation happened under both their noses.  That un-breathing Midge and Moose will remain (for now) trapped under the aluminum-reinforced cover of the swimming pool, loudly banging away as a constant audible reminder is fitting, if morbid.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

1.  Hiram Lodge, usually the jealous and cantankerous father, emerges in "Sleepover" as the unlikely hero (of sorts).  His hostility for Archie Andrews remains intact, but he gives the issue an adult gravitas as he crumples under the responsibility of losing Moose and Midge, two minors under his roof and in his care.  His old-fashioned, vocal, and (at least to my mind) distasteful eagerness for a son in the issue's opening flashback is tempered somewhat by his later attitude.

2.  Ginger and Nancy may have come across a little shrewish (if still sympathetic) in "Dance of the Dead", but here they show themselves to be feisty, considerate to each other and their former friends, and more than usually competent in a crisis.

3.  I've made no small secret of my appreciation of Francavilla's contributions to Afterlife with Archie in earlier reviews, adding a powerful pulp horror sensibility to the universe and an older, more mature look for most of the series' high-school characters.  And this one is no different, but I'd also like to register some appreciation for the vintage comic shorts Aguirre-Sacasa and Archie editors have been including at the back of the book.  The stories themselves—this week a fable about a narcissistic celebrity horror host who looks more like Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera than a vampire and gets his comeuppance courtesy of a disgruntled former writer and a demonomicon—aren't all that exceptional, but they're a delightful nod to Afterlife with Archie's comic predecessors and inspirations.

[February 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #2

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Two—"Dance of the Dead"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Oh my!  I mean, oh my!  The dark undercurrents of Afterlife with Archie's premier issue come to a sinister boil in its follow-up.  Jughead's assault on the school dance is gruesome, and Veronica's recollection of it sincerely chilling.  Remembering her own icy and condescending dismissal of Ethel's birthday parties, Veronica selfishly—and astutely—wishes her father had forced her to attend just once, so "...I'd feel less guilty about those thirty seconds...  ...those terrible thirty seconds while Jughead Jones ate Ethel Muggs right in front of us, and no one did anything but stare..." (Afterlife with Archie #2: 6-7).

Jason and Cheryl Blossom—Archie's rich, elitist Pembrooke Academy rivals—make their debut in Aguirre-Sacasa's zombie incarnation.  Their Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes are exceptionally eerie in Francavilla's two-tone color scheme.  And their relationship is intensified to dangerously co-dependent at best, ambiguously incestuous at worst.  It's characteristic of Aguirre-Sacasa's dark irony that the havoc they conspire to inflict on Riverdale's dance has already been exponentially exceeded by Jughead's monstrous appearance.  More than anything in an issue filled with horror, their transition from scheming pranksters to unsettled teens sets the sincerely frightening tone of Afterlife with Archie.

Likewise, Afterlife with Archie transforms the Archie universe's familiar tensions in the sudden crisis.  There's nothing like a zombie apocalypse, for instance, to suddenly unite Betty and Veronica.  After years—decades in the eternal, unmoving chronology of Archie's high school career—of trying to infiltrate Lodge Manor, Archie finds himself seeking refuge from a beleaguered Hiram Lodge.  And Dilton Doiley (dressed as Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Chuck Clayton (perhaps as psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis from Halloween, whose merit he defended in the previous issue) are the first to correctly diagnose the apocalypse.

Francavilla's artwork—his pulp and horror sensibilities, his use of heavy shadows and warm palates—is exceptional.  Archie's wholesome reputation has been shattered, and the dramatically changed appearance of its illustrations helps set the tone.  It should come as no particular surprise, since no one really in Francavilla's artwork ever looks bad, but he manages to morph goofball and inexplicable chick-magnet Archie Andrews into a hot redhead with a muscular build and chiseled features.  No other character has benefited from the make-over more than he.

[January 2014]

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]