Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: The Crucible

This is another title, the second in the Archie Horror series, by author Robert Aguirre-Sacasa (who kicked the imprint off with Afterlife with Archie) and artist Robert Hack. I think it’s really well done, though I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as Afterlife. Why not? Because it’s so dark.

I don’t mean the art is dark. Hack has a sketchy style, but it’s not heavily shadowed or murky. What I mean by dark is that there is very little humour, quite a bit of unpleasant violence, and a whole lot of devil worship. The comic is rated as Teen + for “Violence and Mature Content” but I could almost see them putting some kind of “upsetting to those with religious beliefs” warning on it as well as they really lean on that angle pretty hard. The witches we meet aren’t nature-loving Wiccans but are instead the blood-thirsty servants of the Dark Lord himself. There’s some of the same vibe going on with witches as there was with the zombies, as we find out that the good citizens of Greendale/Riverdale are, beneath the surface, possessed by the same evil passions as those of Salem in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown.” Rip off the polite façade of Norman Rockwell Americana and you’ll find flesh-eating monsters and devil-worshippers holding black masses in the woods.

Or you could look to the inspiration for Afterlife and compare it to that of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Thanks to Romero, zombies have always had something a bit comic about them. But as Aguirre-Sacasa puts it in his Introduction, the models they were looking to here were films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, with a bit of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible thrown in (though that seems to have mainly just given the comic its otherwise obscure subtitle).

The story has it that amateur witches Betty and Veronica raise Madame Satan, a nightmarish figure with mini-skulls for eyeballs torn from the yellowing pages of Pep Comics in 1941 (one of which is included here as a fun bonus). It seems Mrs. S. got jilted by Sabrina’s warlock father years ago and then got sent to hell. And hell hath no fury like a woman burning in hell who’s there because she was scorned. Since Sabrina’s dad is imprisoned in a tree and her mom locked up in an asylum, Madame Satan decides to go after Sabrina herself for revenge. Sabrina, meanwhile, is living with her two witchy aunts and is about to give herself over to the Devil on her sixteenth birthday. But Madame Satan has other plans.

It’s a good story, and Madame Satan is a great villain, but I felt like it really needed to have some lighter moments. It seems very cynically grown-up, even down to drawing the thirteen-year-old Sabrina with a full figure and adult features. Then it ends with more of a cliffhanger than the rest of these collections. I’m sure I’ll read the rest of it because I’m curious how things play out, but it’s not really my thing. At least I can’t think of any other way of saying that I thought it was excellent but not something I liked very much.

Graphicalex