The terror of self-discovery.
Creative Staff:
Story: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Art and Colors: Francesco Francavilla
Letters: Jack Morelli
What They Say:
BETTY: RIP Pt. 4, “The Trouble with Reggie.” The Horror began in Riverdale when Reggie Mantle struck and killed Jughead’s beloved pooch Hot Dog. Since then, Reggie has been living with this secret knowledge—and terrible guilt. With no one to talk to about it, Reggie has started to crack under the strain. He is seeing visions of his dead friends—or are they literal ghosts? When an act of kindness prompts a confession from him, Reggie must decide for himself, once and for all—is there any good within him? Or is Reggie, as we’ve always suspected, beyond redemption? For TEEN+ Readers.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
What would you do if you had a secret? Not the piddling little secrets we hold everyday—who we secretly hate, who we secretly desire; all the little thoughts that run through our mind every day that we thank God no one knows about. No, I’m talking about the worst thing you’ve ever done. The one act that ruined everything in your limited world. Now multiply that until your world is macroscopic and is just the world. Do that and you’ll know how Reggie Mantle feels.
The world ended with the death of a dog. Hot Dog, beloved of Jughead, to be exact. Some coward ran him over and left his corpse in Jughead’s yard. In desperation, Jughead turned to his friend Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Sabrina performed a forbidden spell, and something other than life animated Hot Dog’s corpse. The hellhound bit Jughead, who became the King of the Dead, and the two became Patient Zero for a zombie outbreak that now encompasses the entire world.
Archie, Betty, Veronica, Kevin, Reggie, and others from Riverdale managed to escape. They travel the countryside, trying to survive and outrun the zombie horde that nips at their heels. No one knew who killed Hot Dog. No one save for the man who did it—Reggie Mantle.
Again, imagine what it would be like to hold a secret of that magnitude. It would eat away at you like a cancer, and that’s what it does to Reggie. He watches Archie and Betty lead the others, acting the heroes in their story, and wishing that he were in their place. After all, as he says, everyone’s the hero of their own story.
For Reggie, that heroism has transformed into martyrdom. He confesses his crime to Kevin, and walks away from the group. He backtracks to find the zombie legion and plans to simply walk through their ranks, letting them tear him limb-from-limb.
But that doesn’t happen.
The zombies split like the Red Sea until Reggie stands facing the unholy trinity behind this horror: Jughead, the King of the Dead; Hot Dog, Anubis, the Jackal; and Sabrina, the Bride of Cthulhu. Instead of tearing him apart, they give him an offer: return to the survivors, make nice with them, and then kill Betty. If he does this, they will return the love of Reggie’s life, Midge Klump, restored to her former beauty and obedient to Reggie’s every desire.
As Reggie says, you don’t really find out who you are until the world tests you. This was his crucible, his moment of redemption—bloody and painful as it might be—and he fails. For all his fear that he’s a sociopath, for all the guilt he felt over being the instigator of the apocalypse, Reggie remains a selfish, egotistical fool, and he seems more than ready to bring destruction down on the heads of his friends.
I didn’t notice it before, but there’s a definite The Stand vibe creeping into this story. The world has ended, two groups rise from the ashes—one good, one evil—and the world becomes a giant crucible where some give in to the darkest desires of their hearts. The fact that it’s Archie and his friends that are experiencing it makes this somewhat surreal, but the writing and art are so good that you go along with the ride.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla do a fantastic job of capturing different flavors of horror in this work. The character study of Reggie alone is frightening, seeing a man realize and accept that he’s sociopathic. But more than that, you can feel the tension in the air. The zombie hordes are coming out of the horizon, and this lone group of survivors doesn’t know how they’ll eat tomorrow, much less save themselves from eternal damnation.
This is some of the best horror I’ve read in a while, and the key to it is the realization that it’s the people who matter. You can have the scariest damn monster in the world doing the scariest damn things you could imagine, but if you don’t care about the characters, if they don’t possess a rich and vibrant inner life and deep facets to their personalities, then what’s the point? It’s a tragedy when Reggie finally gives in to his darker side because this issue builds him up as a real person and not just a two-dimensional drawing.
Francesco Francavilla captures it all—the sorrow, the joys, the dread. He does a great job of presenting us a bedraggled Reggie and a conflicted Archie, and boy can he draw zombies. He also uses color in interesting ways. Most of the issue is colored in yellows and oranges, giving it an almost sickly feel, as if the world itself is infected with this evil. His colors put you on edge and make you feel a little seasick, which is how I imagine Archie and his pals feel.
In Summary:
If you’re looking for good horror, look no further. Afterlife with Archie is almost embarrassingly good. It’s good to the point where I strain to find things to criticize, out of fear that I’ll lose my reviewer credibility (what little I have, anyway). But, man, I just can’t get enough of it. Horror comes in many different flavors, and Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla manage to capture them. What makes this comic work is that the cosmic horror is grounded in real human characters and emotions, elevating this to a tragedy. Dr. J gives this an….
Grade: A+
Age Rating: T+
Released By: Archie Comics
Release Date: May 25th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99
