Everybody Dies: Afterlife With Archie #4 Review

This isn’t going to be a long review, because it really doesn’t have to be… but I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I originally picked up the first issue of Afterlife With Archie as a goof. It looked like a zombie movie for slightly older kids, with art by one of my current favorite artists, and it turned out to be more fun than I anticipated from an Archie book.

I picked up the second issue because I liked the first, and I liked it a lot more than the first, because it seemed that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was using the pretext of a zombie apocalypse to peel back the all-American veneer of Riverdale and examine a suburb with some dark secrets, kinda like the way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks.

We are now at the fourth issue. And this little book that I initially assumed would be a moderately dark and PG-13 violent horror-ish story for kids has gone completely and totally off the fucking rails. In a good way.

This Archie comic features, along with the ongoing zombie apocalypse, a family pet dying, incest and parricide. Let me repeat that: dead pet, brother / sister love, and parental murder. In Riverdale. From the Archie comics. In an Archie comic.

This makes Ed Brubaker’s Archie riff in Criminal: The Last of The Innocents, where the Archie analogue was a degenerate gambler and the Jughead analogue was a junkie, look damn near quaint.

Normally, this is where I would recap the general plot of the book, but I really don’t want to give too much away here. Instead, I want to reiterate something that I’ve mentioned before in reviewing books from this series: Aguirre-Sacasa is doing spectacular work in using the commonly-known history of Archie comics as barely-spoken subtext to amp up the horror of what is, with that subtext taken away, really just one zombie apocalypse in a small town story of about a million in comics, on TV and in the movies.

Seriously: the broad plot strokes of this series aren’t anything special: there’s a patient zero that starts a zombie plague, an initial wave of violence that clusters small groups of characters together, the slow tension of the monsters slowly closing in and breaking through defenses, and, at least in the better zombie stories, characters we care about cracking under the strain of having to do terrible things they never would have previously considered, all in order to stay alive. We’ve seen that shit as far back as Night of The Living Dead, and we see it now 22 weeks a year in AMC’s The Walking Dead. From a plot standpoint, there is nothing really new going on in Afterlife With Archie…

…except that it features Archie. And that simple fact adds about a half-century of feel-good Americana to all the characters and settings, which makes what would normally be actually pretty mundane horror tragedy all that much worse. A wise man once said, “When one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic,” and in most zombie movies, the victims are statistics. We get to know them quickly, and when most of them go, we’re as psyched to see the gore effects as we are affected by their death. But when it’s a long-running Archie character who sucks the pipe, well, we’re back in the realm of tragedy. It really, really works.

As does the simple fact that this is all happening in an Archie comics. I’ve stated already that my initial read on this series was that it would be a little bit dark and violent for slightly older kids who still read Archie comics. I was wrong; this is a violent and bleak and twisted as damn near any zombie comic you might find at your local comic store. In this issue, we see a character get his head bashed in by a baseball bat and his neck broken in a violent fall, all just about in center camera… and it’s a character who has been around forever, being beaten to death by an even more beloved character, and when it’s all over, we get a splash page of the victor standing over the body with a baseball bat that’s dripping blood. And this is in an Archie book!

So what the net effect is that, even though this is a scene we’ve seen in a million zombie stories, it’s got two extra things working for it: the fact that it’s Archie characters, and the fact that part of your brain refuses to believe that what you’re reading could possibly happen, because you’re seeing it happen in an Archie comic, for God’s sake! And that combination turns a scene we’ve seen before into a real and effective gut punch, the way it does the entire book.

I have said that Francesco Francavilla has become one of my favorite artists, and here’s a reason why: there is a page in this issue that I won’t scan, because it gives away a major plot point. But the book is split into a 3 row by 5 column grid. And several of the center panels expose a semi-splash page of a character with a baseball bat raised over his head. While the others switch back and forth between flashbacks of a happier time between the two characters, and bloody images of the beating in progress. In a single page, there’s a wealth of action and emotion, all in a beautiful, pulpy, medium-lined style with four clear color cues to tell the reader what they are seeing at all times. This is great, great art.

Look, I’ll cop to loving Afterlife With Archie #4, and the series in general, because of a certain amount of shock value. I still can’t believe I’m seeing this kind of stuff in an Archie comic book. But I do love it, even as I realize that I’m likely witnessing lightning in a bottle. The fact is that it’s unlikely that Aguirre-Sacara will be able to come up with something so unexpected and over the top that it can shock and surprise me the way this series has. But for now, it’s still shocking and surprising me. If you are a comics fan, you really, really should be buying this book.