Something Spooky: Taking A Bite With ‘Afterlife With Archie’

A heavy spookiness is in the air as All Hallow’s Eve, otherwise known as Halloween, creeps and crawls ever closer. While candy and costumes are big parts of this spooktacular season, scares and frights are right there with them.

Comic books aren’t all just superheroes and science fiction. Horror has found its roots in all forms of comic books. To celebrate the season, we turn our gaze on the town of Riverdale and its iconic residents with Afterlife With Archie.

By now, there isn’t anything novel about taking the usually wholesome bevy of Riverdale High students and throwing them into other genres — especially more adult type genres. From Riverdale to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and everywhere in-between, we’ve seen a lot of them in various forms of media.

Back in 2013 though, things were quite different. What a time that was, when Archie Comics decided to take some really big swings with their publishing line. Afterlife With Archie was one of those titles, the first not to be aimed at children, with a teen rating, and came soon after the publisher officially dropped the Comics Code Authority standard.

Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, currently the chief creative officer at Archie, it features amazing artwork of one of the best horror artists around, Francesco Francavilla. They were joined by letterer Jack Morelli for the series.  It was Francavilla’s work on an EC Comics inspired Archie variant cover that helped birth this series.

After Jughead’s beloved dog Hot Dog is struck by a car (driven by a familiar character), he turns to the magical Sabrina Spellman to save his dog. Unfortunately, there are dire consequences as the zombie dog turns his master and begins a zombie apocalypse that quickly sends the idyllic Riverdale into hell.

Unlike the CW’s Riverdale series, this comic series handled the adult-ification of the series in a less ham-fisted way. There is death, grief, shades of PTSD, consequences of adultery, and much more. Characters are flawed, making massive mistakes caused by either ego or grief or just sheer complacency.

That being said, if one is hoping for deep rich character work, this isn’t the place. Many of the characters are mostly fitting into very stereotypical teenager or horror roles, with Archie and Hiram Lodge at the forefront. All the horror and tension, watching people come apart and come together as the world burns, is still there though.

Essentially it’s everything about the zombie apocalypse genre that people love (or hate) wrapped up in the trappings of the Archie universe. It’s a fully baked showcase of how the iconic kid friendly characters can be so much more, which became sort of the motto for the publisher for most of the 2010s.

Born from this series was a whole line of Archie branded horror books, with their own spiffy logo. Exploring things from Veronica as a vampire to Jughead as a werewolf to Betty as a werewolf hunter, not to mention the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series which eventually spawned the aforementioned television series. Hell, there was even a series with the Blossom twins competing with each other to become the Antichrist.

Unfortunately, anyone that dives into this series needs to know it comes to an unsatisfying end. Not because of story beats or a failure to land the proverbial plane in crafting a true finale. No, this series ends at ten issues right in the middle of an unfinished story arc. Aguirre-Sacasa, as the CCO of Archie, became too busy overseeing all the television adaptations that his own writing work dried up into nothing at this point.

While the Sabrina series was also unceremoniously stopped, he returned to it years later to throw in some more work. Zombie Archie fans were not so lucky. A portion of that came also from the fact that like many publishers, Archie was hit hard during the beginning of COVID in 2020. Unlike others though, they have never really bounced back to those creative highs , mostly still focused on digests and one-shots and other things that aren’t quite hitting the same beat that they had going prior to the world changing.

There is a television series on the way adapting the series (what timing!), so at least there is a chance to see where the comic might have gone in another medium. At the same time, perhaps the television focus will give a financial kick to returning to the comics, wrapping up that bit of the story as well.

Either way, the lasting impact of this series remains. So to does the entertainment value, and why anyone who hasn’t read it yet should do so this spooky season.

It’s more than worth the time.