The Riverdale High School Bull Dogs Are Not What They Seem: Afterlife With Archie #2 Review

Editor’s Note: This review’s got spoilers, Meathead. What? Wrong Archie? Well, screw you. Dingbat.

Jesus Christ. And I mean that in the best possible way.

This Archie comic book starts with implied incest, moves to graphically bloody zombie violence, jumps to conflicted and closeted lesbians, spends a little time with spoiled children and their obviously disappointed parents, throws in more graphic violence, tosses in a soupcon of implication toward steroid abuse, and ends with the hero telling a girl’s father that he’s spent years trying to surreptitiously bone his daughter under cover of darkness. Again: this Archie comic has all of this stuff.

So what we have here, if you take away all the Archie elements, is a pretty solid if straight-ahead zombie story for young adults, with with enough social issues to make it relevant and modern. Which is fine, and surely a fun-enough read… but with those Archie elements, you get what feels like a look into the gutters and the bleed of 50 years of Archie comics. It’s like reading a version of Twin Peaks set in the Archie universe, where a violent event throws the covers off some pretty dark and difficult suburban secrets.

This is a really, really good comic book.

We open with Jason and Cheryl Blossom going to the Riverdale High School Halloween Dance – you know, the one where Zombie Jughead showed up and ate Mrs. Grundy and Principal Wetherbee in the first issue? – with Cheryl saying she plans to cocktease Archie while creepily implying that she’ll only have eyes and orgasms for Jason. Then they hear the screaming and the warnings that bad shit is going down and decide to go home. Cut to Veronica recounting events of the dance to her rich father, events including Jughead eating Ethel Muggs while everyone just watched, with Betty and Veronica killing Ethel again and again to no effect, while Archie, Reggie and Moose haul Jughead into the locker room, with speculating that Jughead’s problem might be bad steroids. After cutting briefly to Ginger and Nancy at Pop’s Choklit (sp? Seriously, I don’t read Archie comics. I know they spell it weird, but I don’t know in what weird way) Shop(pe?), pretending to be dateless while actually arguing over the closeted nature of their relationship, the gang agrees that they are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and decide to flee to the safest place they know.

So I’ll start with the pure horror part of the story, which is, frankly, only okay. Like I said, the zombie story is pretty by-the-numbers, with your standard attack on the gym with some bafflement as to what’s happening and the decision to bolt straight for high ground. The elements are things we’ve seen as far back as Night of The Living Dead, and they are competently executed, with enough blood to meet the formula, but not so much that its inappropriate for young adult audiences. The one tricky part for me was how quickly everyone agrees that it’s a zombie attack – Betty literally says, “Don’t ask questions, just accept it,” to get the plot moving along – but then again, I suppose I can buy a bunch of millennials who’ve grown up in the post-28 Days Later media / zombie saturation seeing the signs and understanding them innately. But still, it felt like writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa just wanted to knock out the preliminaries and get to the good stuff.

But even though I am a sucker for a zombie story, it is not the zombie stuff that has finally sucked me in. Aguirre-Sacasa seems to be using the disruption that the zombie attack represents as a way to peel back the pleasant surface appearances of Riverdale and its residents to show us secrets and a certain amount of darkness happening behind the suburban doors. It is almost David Lynchian: the disruption brings to the surface that the rich brother and sister might be toying with people and boning each other for amusement, that the class jock might be using steroids, that the town might be too judgmental for two gay teens to feel safe in coming out, and that the spoiled rich girl and her father might resent the hell out of each other. I am a Twin Peaks nut since the show premiered in 1990, and I saw a lot of that show in this comic book.

But as strong as Twin Peaks was, the town of Twin Peaks was about a simple generic suburb where a violent act caused the secrets to bubble to the surface. In Afterlife With Archie, it’s no generic suburb: it’s fucking Riverdale. It’s a suburb with years and years of history so ingrained in the American consciousness that even I, who never read an Archie comic before the first issue of Afterlife With Archie, knows who these people are. It’s one thing to see some generic high school jock imply that he’s friendly with steroids, but it is quite another when it’s Moose from Archie. Same thing about some teenaged jock admitting he’s been trying to sneak into some other rich girl’s bedroom all the time: it has that much more impact when the jock is Archie fucking Andrews. And while I’ll admit that I have no idea who Jason and Cheryl Blossom are, or who Ginger and Nancy are, seeing the prior two bent and incestuous and the latter two afraid of being judged and ostracized for their homosexuality has double the impact simply by dint of the fact that these are Archie characters. Lynch showed us the shameful secrets behind a suburb. Aguirre-Sacasa is showing us the shameful secrets behind the American suburb. And it packs a whallop.

I’ve not made it a secret that I am a huge fan of Francesco Francavilla, and there’s nothing in this issue to change my mind. The man gives good pulp, with red-tinted panels throughout the book, good PG-13 violence, and just a solid genre sensibility. The scenes in the gym could have come from any pulp horror magazine from the 30s, and even the malt shoppe scene between Ginger and Nancy looked as if Philip Marlowe could have walked in at any moment. And the key to me overall is that he plays this story straight; you can tell who the characters all are, but Francavilla draws them in his own style to give the visuals a big degree of separation from actual Archie comics. If you’re a fan of Francavilla’s art, you owe it to yourself to get this book, no matter how afraid you are of the guys at the comic store sneering at you for buying an Archie book.

I dug the first issue of Afterlife With Archie partly due to the novelty of seeing a straight-ahead horror story set in the Archie universe. But with this second issue, I’m seeing a whole hell of a lot more going on under the hood. Aguirre-Sacasa is not just giving readers a zombie story, but he seems to be giving us a story about the darkness and secrets of an American suburb. There is a ton of depth to this story, and I am frankly shocked at how much I am getting from this fucking Archie comic.

This one’s worth your time. Give it a try.