After reading the great review by Halbs and finding myself in a quandary over what to read next (anyone else feel overwhelmed when you have so many books you WANT to read?!?), I decided to test out the waters with Afterlife with Archie: Escape from Riverdale (which I at first wrote as Greendale, because I guess I have Community on the mind). After just finishing five 500 page plus books that dealt with zombies (although they’re never called zombies), I have been missing my fiendish ghouls. This would be just the thing…
and it was…
and it wasn’t…
but it really was…
The nice thing about this comic is that you don’t really have to have much knowledge of Archie in its other incarnations. This is good because all I know about the Archie comic is that Betty is the girl next door, Veronica is a vamp, and that both of them (inexplicably?) fight over Archie. I recognized Jughead from the crown on his head (can someone explain that?!?!) and I mmmmaaaaayyyy have had some vague recollection of Hot Dog (Jughead’s dog). Other than that, I know virtually nothing about Archie and it worked out just fine, I think.
The story gets moving very quickly and almost immediately the reader knows where this is going to go. With the help of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Jughead attempts to bring his dog back from the dead after he was hit by a car. If you’ve read Pet Sematary, then you have an idea where this is headed. Add a fun setting in the form of a Halloween Dance, a countdown to the contagion of Riverdale and a large group of sitting duck teenagers and baby, you got a stew going!
Here was my only concern about the story and it’s pretty minor. I wanted more in the first book. I wanted more contagion and I wanted more character development before anyone shows up at the dance to infect anyone. This could be on me as a reader; I don’t know if the characters have any other facets other than the love triangle, and the one guy who always gets in trouble. Obviously people who have read the Archie comic series have seen the characters develop (or not develop?), but for me they are kind of just stock characters. Because of that, I don’t know if I really care who gets infected because I don’t really know them. This is not to say that I’m not interested in the story, I am. I just want to get a little more character development so that I’m forced to care. That being said, regardless of any fleshing out of characters I AM a little curious to see if Betty or Veronica go down first and which of them infects Archie OR if they fight over who lets Archie infect them.
This was a great recommendation and such a fast read that I was disappointed when I got to the end so quickly, not due to the story but because it was over. I see myself buying the next few stories in between longer books as a bit of a palate cleanser (that doesn’t sound pretentious at all, does it?). If you’re looking for something fun to read, hit it up!
