Afterlife With Archie

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I have always been a comic fan, and for many years have entertained the idea of being a comic writer or artist. I mainly drew superheroes but also always found the drawings of Dan DeCarlo in Archie comics alluring. He just had this way about making the comics fun, and he really had a way of making all the women look gorgeous, which was probably from his previous occupation of drawing jokes in ‘men’s’ magazines. My love of horror leaked into my fondness for Archie and when I was about 19 I actually drew an entire comic of Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame, butchering his way through the Archie gang.

I had a lot of fun writing and drawing that and it featured scenes such as Veronica being cut in half during sex with Archie ( and Archie’s todger popping up in the middle of her corpse) and in a tribute to Heathers, Moose and Reggie dying after a love tryst in the woods when Voorhees first emerges from the River ( the comic was set between Friday the 13th Part VII and VIII).

Of course I knew that seeing as how Archie Comics were such a stickler for the oppressive Comics Code Authority, a self imposed body that restricts various acts in comics that may corrupt our children, that violence such as that would rarely if ever hit their books (though the inclusion of a clutch of Witches in the Sabrina comics were always a surprise) and even Archie’s brief encounter with the Punisher from Marvel Comics failed to raise too much interest, that is until now… As Archie and his friends fight the dead!

Afterlife with Archie started as a joke alternate zombie cover of the long time comic series Life With Archie, which was so popular that the makers decided that with that, and the popularity of comics such as The Walking Dead and Marvel Comics’ Marvel Zombies, that it should become a regular series.

This first collection collects the first 5 issues and has, as a bonus, all the alternate covers of the individual issues presented and artist Francesco Francavilla’s initial sketch layouts for each page, which is kind of like a DVD making of!

The story goes like this… And some of it may sound familiar. Jughead has a serious problem, his beloved dog Hot Dog was accidentally run over by Reggie late one night, so Jughead takes his dog to Sabrina, the teenage witch, to see if her aunts can bring him back to life, but they can’t as Hot Dog is well and truly gone.

Sabrina, however, visits Jughead later that night with a book called the Necronomicon which is full of dark magic, with the idea to bring the dog back to life. They go their separate ways, but Sabrina is punished by her aunts for using dark magic and banished to another dimension.

Hot Dog rises from the dead, but he has changed. He bites Jughead who of course becomes the first of the living dead and he then starts infecting the town of Riverdale, starting with the school Halloween party. Most of the gang eventually manage to escape and hole up in the Lodge residence… But are they really safe there from the legions of the undead.

I really wanted to like this comic, but it fell apart of SO many levels. First, Archie comics have a ‘look’ developed by the aforementioned Dan DaCarlo and continued since then by the likes of artists like Stan Goldberg, and occasionally they have experimented outside that look. To average success. The art in this is done more traditional comic style, and I’m sorry but if I am offered Archie Vs Zombies, that’s what I want  not something that is reminiscent of The Walking Dead. This is no criticism of artist Francesco Francavilla whose panel design and color palette for a zombie comic are fantastic, but I wanted ARCHIE comics, not a horror comic with familiar names.

Archie Comics has since completely abandoned that DeCarlo look, and I’m hoping it is to great success, and even though I’m am criticising the art as part of this review, it’s more how derivative it is that makes it a frustrating read.

Which leads me to the second, and for me the main issue, was the story. There is NOTHING new here. The resurrection of Hot Dog is stolen completely from Pet Semetary, Evil Dead’s incantation from the Necronomicon and the eventually holing up and escape from Veronica’s mansion feels a lot like the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I understand that both The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later stole their initial stories bases from The Day of the Triffids, but that doesn’t make it OK to do it in another format. Is a new idea SO hard to come by? I also get these may have been an attempt at getting horror fans onside with nudge nudge wink winks, but they’re were so obvious and cheesy that for me it felt more like fromage than homage.

With these art and story issues, it feels like it doesn’t know what it’s identity is. Is it an Archie comic or not? Is it aimed at horror fans? If so the story will disappoint, or is it aimed at Archie fans, in which case the art will disappoint. If it’s aimed at both, like I am, it will disappoint on both counts.  I will say though, the book itself, though, is nicely presented.

Overall: **