The elements of the story are all familiar: a tragic accident, a grieving loved one, a forbidden magic spell to bring the dead back to life. What starts out with the best intentions ends with an entire town under attack by a hoard of zombies. The difference here is that this isn’t Stephen King or another Night of the Living Dead clone, it’s Archie and the gang, with Sabrina the Teenage Witch breaking the rules to raise Jughead’s beloved pup Hot Dog from the grave. Afterlife with Archie has been running for a few months now, but a reprint run started on October 22 and I stumbled across the graphic novel for the first time a week before Halloween. How could I not pick this up?
The series started with a variant cover to Life with Archie #23. Artist Francesco Francavilla created a retro image of our hero Archie backing away in horror from a group of zombies who have just pulled themselves out of their graves, and the zombie in the lead is wearing Jughead’s crown. Neat picture, thought writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, what a shame there isn’t a story to go along with the cover. The idea kept snowballing from there and led to an entire alternate world Archie story (and a second series about the Archie spin-off character: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which started just this month, also written by Aguirre-Sacasa.)
The first thing that I have to rave about is Francavella’s artwork. All of the Riverdale characters are recognizable, but done in a splashy pulp style like something from the 1930’s. Francavella does the colors as well, and highlights most of the pages with stark oranges and purples. It’s almost minimalistic; Francavella can convey an awful lot with just a hand and a dropped apple dripping with blood. Everything speeds up during moments of an attack, which are shown in a crash of tiny panels, the images blinking back and forth between the attacker, the victim, and what’s going on in the victim’s head while they’re being attacked.
The story itself is intriguing too, since the writer doesn’t just stick with the way the Archie characters have been portrayed in the past. The plot reminds me a little bit of Stephen King; everything takes place in a small town, with small-town people and small town relationships. Then something absolutely horrific happens and it brings out all the strangeness and dysfunction that everyone’s been hiding up until this point. Betty and Veronica are still fighting over Archie, but the rivalry is cutting them a lot deeper now, and you have to wonder how much worse things are going to get before their whole Best Friends Forever act ends with one of them pushing the other one over a cliff. Nancy Woods may be dating Chuck Clayton, but she’s also in a secret relationship with Ginger Lopez, and Ginger’s getting tired of being the something-on-the-side (“Brokeback Riverdale” as she refers to it). And there’s…something going on between Cheryl Blossom and her twin brother Jason. Something which not even they’re comfortable talking about directly (if that’s not specific enough for you, the promo hashtag for issue #4 of the series was “Blossomsintheattic.” I’ll just leave it at that…)
Afterlife with Archie is a simple mashup – Monster Movie meets Classic Comic – done in a clever way. The story was picking up speed by the end of the first graphic novel, and there’s so much potential for these characters to be twisted in new and unusual ways as they have to fight past all their zombified loved-ones in order to escape from Riverdale. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is jumping from this series to a possible TV version of the original comic book. If this makes it to the air it looks like it will be produced by the same folks responsible for “Arrow” and “The Flash,” and Aguirre-Sacasa describes the show as being “Archie meets David Lynch,” which is pretty much all you need to say to get my attention. There’s also a chance that the show will have “Afterlife”-themed Halloween specials, so we’ll either get to see stories from the graphic novel in live-action format, or we’ll get to see the story being pushed even further than it’s been going now.