Bloated Halloween part 3 - Afterlife With Archie!

Afterlife With Archie # 1
Script: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Art: Francesco Francavilla

Just a quick heads up...I'm going to spoil the crap out of everything, so if that's a problem, stop reading this and then sprint to your nearest LCS to grab a copy of this book.

It is the greatest of all understatements to say that I had high expectations for this comic. A good story can be crushed by those kind of lofty demands. Perhaps my review is complete when I tell you that the first issue of Afterlife With Archie satisfied all of my unfair preconceptions about what it could and should be, and exceeded most of them.

This is a really, really, really good comic book, and a nearly perfect horror comic.

I talked about this comic for a bit on the latest installment of Chronic Insomnia, and I placed most of the credit for AWA's success with Francesco Francavilla. My thinking has crystallized a bit more in the few days I've had to sit and ponder.....and while I still believe that Francavilla's efforts are the lynchpin, I shorted Aguirre-Sacasa just a little, and I mean to rectify that here.

The primary obstacle to Afterlife With Archie is the fact that every fiber of Riverdale's being strains against darkness and horror. Neither the characters, nor the tone, nor the history of the concept want anything to do with Somber Town or Disturbing City.

So....how do you do it? How do you build a fort of dread out of cheesy smiles? How do you get a modern audience to invest in your world when there's a guy with a crown on his head in the scene? A yeomen stands no chance of crafting a structure that will stand up to the audience's disbelief, and a master craftsmen would look at the materials, furrow their stately brow and pass, wouldn't they?

But if you had to do it with those tools - what's your plan?

Well, here's what Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did: Firstly, he made the incredibly brave/bizarre decision to play it straight, and hew closely to the zombie classics. It's hard to overstate the balls it takes to attempt something like that. If you were worried about the book treating the material seriously - put those worries to bed.

This is a pure horror book. It's dark, it's apocalyptic, there are moments of Kafka/Cronenberg level body horror. The comic begins building dread with the first page and never lets you off the hook for a moment. There is no ironic winking to the audience, self-deprecation, or "aw shucks" smarminess to rescue you from the sense that things are going terribly, terribly wrong and you're not sure you want to see how wrong but goddamnit you have to turn the page to watch it happen any way. If you like George Romero, you'll love this comic.

So what tools does Aguirre-Sacasa have to use? Well, trouble in Riverdale often begins with its resident jerk and bad seed, Reggie. In this case, the end of the world begins with Reggie's ill-advised decision to drive home after a few too many drinks.

His impaired driving takes him on a collision course with Jughead's lovable pooch, Hot Dog. And he dies.

Uh-oh.

In order to get zombies, you're basically stuck with two options - science or magic. Well, the Archie house has licensed Sabrina the Teenage Witch. So Jughead takes Hot Dog over to Melissa Joan Hart's house to see if there's anything to be done. It makes sense. Not logically, of course. You've seen Pet Cemetary, you know how this works. But grieving hearts don't engage in high-level thinking, they only know the hurt of loss.

The witches examine Hot Dog and declare him a lost cause. Had he still been breathing, they could have coaxed more life into him. But once a creature has passed into death...only necromancy brings them back, and that is strictly verboten. For good reason.

Sabrina is a good friend, though, and can't bear to see her friend in such pain, and do you see where this is going? Of course you do, because you've seen this story before. If you want to assign five demerits to Sacasa for borrowing too much and innovating too little, I will understand. I forgive it in this case because it makes so much sense, both in terms of plot and character. I believe these people might do these things in those situations.

Sabrina grabs her Necronomicon and tells Jughead to grab a shovel. They bury Hot Dog, Sabrina chants the incantations....and then comes another wave of building suspense. The comic is constantly reminding you that you have X hours before the end of the world begins. Hot Dog comes back, but he isn't quite right. He bites Jughead. Then Jughead isn't quite right.

When you think about it, it absolutely had to be Jughead. Who else but the character defined by his depraved, gluttonous eating? This is what I'm talking about when I say that I underestimated Aguirre-Sacasa's input. Part of the reason why the book is so air-tight is because he found a way to take those seemingly impossible ingredients and create a savory dish without cheating. That's the character: grotesque eating! Sacasa found a real zombie story in the available materials, without changing or denying any of them.

Once the stage is set, he ratchets up the tension. Sabrina's infraction is instantly discovered. This isn't Fantasia, where the apprentice gets swatted on the behind with a broom for his hijinx. Sabrina's elders remove her offending mouth and then park her into another dimension for a year to cool out for a bit! That might be the moment where I completely submitted and said "Holy shit, this is for real!"

It's all for real, and it all feels "real" because Francesco Francavilla makes you believe it with his incredible art. I'm not sure what else to say about it other than to declare the obvious - looking at these pages is like walking into a classic horror film.

The angles, the lighting, the coloring...I don't know what it is. I don't have those goods in my analytical tool box. The lines aren't strictly evocative of anything I can point to. It doesn't photocopy Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead. It doesn't precisely look like those things, but it indisputably makes me feel like I felt while watching those things.

Aguirre-Sacasa brings a kind of poetic sense to the story, but it's Francavilla who sells the authenticity of the horror. This is Eisner-worthy stuff. No, I'm not even close to kidding about that.

Bottom line here is that if you have any interest in horror at all, this is a MUST buy. If you have no interest in horror, this comic is so good it might just swing you over and is a MUST buy. It's $2.99, people, you can feel good experimenting and rewarding the effort.

It even feels like a real comic when you hold it in your hand, because the cover stock is thicker than most anything published these days and has a little "grit" to it. Kudos to the folks at Archie for going all out and paying attention to even the production value.

It's even interesting in a Market Spotlight kind of way. AWA is a direct-market only book, they don't want kids at the grocery stores grabbing this off the shelves and scarring their souls for life. So these might be the scarcest Archie comics in well, ever.

In the back matter, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa tells the origin story of the comic, and cites the zombie variant to Life With Archie # 23 as the inspiration. That makes it an instant classic, and if you should find one at your LCS, I would grab that with gusto. And then sell it to me. I desperately want one of those!

What this reminds me of, oddly enough, is a speech that Alfred gives to Bruce in Batman # 24. (side note: Batman # 24 is a piece de resistance, tour de force, instant classic, and slap any other superlatives you care to on it because it deserves them all) He tells Bruce that he needn't worry about his identity being discovered because deep down, people want to believe that something eternal like The Batman can exist. Now, if you're a fraud, people will reject that and delight in tearing you down. But if you have the skill to sell it, people will delight in submitting to the show.

Francesco Francavilla will have you a believer. Go get this comic.