You have to respect it when someone just decides to take brand integrity and just kind of curb-stomp it. It sounded like a fun idea, the Archie gang being beset by a zombie apocalypse. Though honestly this isn’t even the silliest Archie crossover I’ve encountered. No, it wasn’t just a fever dream you had; there was indeed a crossover between Archie & the Punisher in the nineties. I grew up with Archie comics; I even get that the title of this series is a pun on the long running “Life with Archie” series. It’s been years since I read them, but once I graduated out of Donald Duck, it was basically Archie all the time. So, with a high-concept hook like this, I was expecting to be really entertained. And I was.
What I didn’t expect was to be genuinely emotionally moved, but that happened too. The basic set-up, and I’m not going to spoil anything that happens past the opening couple of scenes, is that Jughead’s beloved dog Hot Dog is killed by a car; moved by the intensity of Jughead’s grief, Sabrina the Teenage Witch unwisely uses a little necromancy and when Hot Dog returns . . . well, as we all know from Pet Sematary, sometimes dead is better and soon the undead are shambling all over Riverdale. As I said, I have a long history with these characters and I felt the weight of that immediately. On page two, there’s a full page panel of a weeping Jughead holding Hot Dog’s dead body and I was absolutely blindsided by the wave of dread that I felt. The art is gorgeous whether you have a connection with these characters or not and it’s played straight enough that I think this book is effective either way. Just past the half-point of the book (which is a collection of the first five issues of the series) there are two death scenes just a couple of pages apart that I found both really heart-wrenchingly sad and also quite disturbing. And they’re both scenes that really couldn’t be communicated the way they are in any other medium than the comic book. I don’t want to spoil them at all because I am highly recommending this book. I’ll just say that I don’t think I’ll forget either of them any time soon. I kind of worry I might be overselling this book; it’s possible that it won’t have the emotional weight I found there if a reader comes to it without any Archie-related history. But I suspect it’ll still be quite good; for the art alone, I think it’s a book that any lover of graphic novels or comics will want to experience first hand. As for me, I’m prepared to call it a masterpiece, a book that upended my expectations in a marvelous, nightmarish, emotionally intense ride. Vol. 2? Oh, yes. 4 stars.
tl;dr – high concept delivers on the entertainment, but also in the area of genuine horror and tragedy; and the art alone makes it a must read. 4 stars.