Archie Horror Presents Chilling Adventures

As you know if you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, I’m a fan of the Archie Horror imprint. I think they’ve done a lot of really creative work and been successful in expanding the Archie brand in ways I wouldn’t have thought likely. That said, Chilling Adventures is a total dud.

The idea here was to present a horror anthology, with a bunch of short stories from a variety of authors and artists. According to the editor’s introduction the model was supposed to be something like EC’s Tales from the Crypt, which I can see, but I think the more immediate reference might have been The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. And if that’s the comparison being made I think Chilling Adventures suffers by it. In fact, I can’t think of any comparison it doesn’t suffer by.

The blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the writers. Normally in a variety-show effort like this you can expect a mix of good and bad. Here I had trouble identifying anything that was good. Pretty much everything on tap was either tired and clichéd or confusing. Sometimes both. There’s a gesture at a frame story as Madame Satan gets bored with ruling hell and takes up being a high school principal. Archie gets trapped in a killer video game. Veronica is possessed by a demon dress. Jinx (Sabrina’s “familiar”) rescues a bunch of stray animals from a sorcerer. Jughead (the werewolf version) fights Krampus. Shape-shifting aliens land in Riverdale. Some of this might have been interesting, especially given the talent assembled, but it’s just a dull mess that never got any better as it stumbled along. Were they in a rush? Uninspired? I don’t know, but nothing here worked for me.

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The Immortal Hulk Volume 7: Hulk is Hulk

Well, that was interesting.

Apparently Xemnu, I’m not sure how, was creating a mass illusion among the entire human race that had everyone believing he (Xemnu) was a cuddly figure from a children’s television show that never actually existed. And implanting other false memories as well. It’s the Mandela effect except on a universal scale. The point of this exercise in mass delusion being to absorb people and repurpose them as mechanical offspring. He’s even got deep inside Hulk’s head . . . but not deep enough as things turn out. You see, the Hulk knows who he really is. Hulk is Hulk.

That’s another good premise to start with, but there was so much other stuff going on that I felt a lot of it sort of got lost in the mix. It’s like Al Ewing has attention-deficit issues and doesn’t want to spend too long developing any particular storyline too much. I mean, I really liked the Minotaur from the previous volume, but when his time is up he gets disposed of quickly here and I never did figure out just what his plan for global domination was.

There are longer story arcs that we return to. The Leader is still up to something relating to the planet Hulk crushed a while back, and he’s also being connected to the Hulk in Hell mythos and something to do with Bruce Banner’s father. I have to say I’m not grooving to all the psychomachia stuff and Dr. Banner’s dissociative identity disorder, but the subplots are working for me and even though the eating-people and skin-shedding tropes feel overused (they both come up again here) I do like the punctuation of the “Hulk Smash!” double-page, hammering-time spreads. In other words, all the meat-and-potatoes comic-book stuff. Do I care about the Hulk’s battle with his personal demons? Not yet, anyway.

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Alien: Revival

It’s easy to get lazy reading comic books. In particular, you can let your eye drift over the art, not paying close attention to everything that’s going on and picking up on all the small but significant details. There was a telling moment for me in this regard when reading Alien: Revival. One of the characters refers to the discovery of a victim of the Xenomorphs that’s found in one of those incubation cocoons, only with her feet torn off. This made me flip back to the scene in question because I hadn’t noticed the victim’s feet. But they had indeed been torn off.

Later in the comic we’ll see other humans who have been given the same treatment, with arms and legs removed. I guess because all that’s needed for gestation is a chest. I don’t recall this ever being a thing in the movies (though I’m not caught up on all the films in the franchise), and it’s a detail that’s pretty damn disturbing, to be honest. But Revival is a comic that takes the Alien mythology and turns up the ick factor quite a bit.

The story is again impressive. As I’ve noted before, the Alien comics beat the pants off the movies in coming up with original plots. I don’t know why they didn’t just film them. Would have avoided all of Ridley Scott’s later mythologizing and the Aliens vs. Predators crap.

The story has it that a bunch of humans have started a religious colony on a terraformed mining moon named Euridice. But wouldn’t you know it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation wants a place to test out a new strand of Xenomorph and so Euridice is up.

At first I thought the whole religious sect of “Spinners” (because they worship a divine Mother who spins creation on her cosmic loom, or something like that) was overdone. They even talk in frontier or Appalachian folksy dialect, saying things like “I might oughta brought that shotgun.” But after a while it grew on me, and they turned it into something interesting when the Spinners started to question whether any of their beliefs and holy books were real or were just a construct of the Corporation.

There’s a kick-ass heroine named Jane who has a bow. There are some very evil synths (androids), one of which I actually guessed the identity of before the reveal. But it was pretty easy this time (usually this series conceals them really well). One thing I did raise an eyebrow at though was Jane swearing at a wicked synth that she was going to kill it. Is that a threat to a synth? Why would a robot care if you threatened to kill it?

Also included in this volume is Alien Annual #1, which is a standalone story starring the security man Gabriel Cruz and some more space marines facing off against yet another evil synth. Androids really aren’t our allies in these stories. Bishop was the exception to the rule.

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