Afterlife with Archie: Escape from Riverdale

This is the title that launched the Archie Horror imprint due to its boffo success both critically and with a wide audience. And I don’t find that success surprising as I loved it in almost every way.

The idea grew out of a parody Life with Archie cover by Francesco Francavilla that had Archie being confronted with zombie versions of Jughead, Betty, and Veronica. This seemed like such a good idea, they decided to make a whole comic out of it. Because this was the time of peak zombie and zombies were going well with everything. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (the novel) had come out a few years earlier and been a smash success, quickly followed up by a major motion picture. Such mash-ups thrive on the incongruity of high-culture being mixed with low, or in this case a wholesome American town turned into an abattoir. After a while, and really it didn’t take long, the joke got stale. But some really good work came out of it too.

Afterlife with Archie is really good. Things kick off naturally enough at Riverdale High’s Halloween dance, and just before the zombie outbreak begins we get a lot of insider jokes keyed to horror movies, which is very much in the manner of these things. Pet Sematary, for example, is referenced because the apocalypse is triggered by Sabrina the Teenage Witch raising Jughead’s beloved Hotdog from the dead, with predictably disastrous results. The seminal text Night of the Living Dead gets a nod in a flashback with Mr. Weatherbee horning after Miss Grundy. Dilton Doiley is the nerdy character from the Scream franchise who knows how horror movies are supposed to play out. And so it goes.

From here we’re taken through the familiar run of zombie incidents. The infected person who tries to brush it off as no big deal. The siege, this time in stately Lodge Manor no less, and subsequent breakout. The confrontation with transformed loved ones. Now you’d think, or at least I would have thought, that none of this was all that interesting or new, and on one level I guess it isn’t, but I still enjoyed it immensely. Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who was the main force behind the TV series Riverdale, adeptly brings the Archie brand into a sort-of real world, fleshing out the main characters just before they start eating flesh. In terms of their appearance they’ve changed a lot from their traditional look – Archie in particular is unrecognizable but for his red hair, and Jughead but for his cap and “S” sweater – but you can actually buy into them as real teenagers. Some liberties are taken with the fringe Riverdalers – Ginger Lopez and Nancy Woods are romantically involved, and Cheryl and Jason Blossom have some kind of incestuous attachment hinted at – but I didn’t know these people anyway.

Poor Jughead: Patient Zero or “Jugdead” here and made into a werewolf in the Jughead: The Hunger series. It’s hard being the odd man out in any gang, and I guess he always was. Were these transformations his revenge? I think that’s something in the mix.

So yes, I loved it. Enjoyed nearly every page of it. And a special shout out for some great lettering by Jack Morelli. The only misstep that registered was the business with Archie’s dog Vegas (I don’t remember him from the comics). I thought they should have skipped that part. But even that might have had a purpose, making me wonder if there was maybe a connection being drawn between his doggy devotion to his master and the Lodge butler Smithers (an ancestor of Waylon Smithers in The Simpsons?) with his sense of duty toward his Mistress Veronica. I liked being drawn into these kinds of conjectures, and they weren’t what I was expecting from an Archie zombie comic. Well done!

Graphicalex