The body count adds a few more.
Creative Staff:
Story: Alex de Campi
Art: Fernando Ruiz, Rich Koslowski
What They Say:
The Predator has tallied his first kills from the ranks of the Riverdale gang! Can they turn the tables without Riverdale becoming a smoking ruin—and without getting detention?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the second installment of Archie Vs Predator getting things much more serious than the first issue was for the most part, the book took off a great deal with what it wanted to do. Keeping it all in traditional Archie style, even for the Predator, it’s a surreal experience to transplant it all into this form and watch the gang trying to survive and not doing well overall. The body count hit quite a few in the second installment and that’s setting the tone here to be sure, especially since everyone that’s still alive at one point or another here is realizing that things aren’t going to go well for them having watched horror movies before. That kind of referential material sometimes doesn’t work well or feels too forced, but it’s pretty welcome here.
The main focus here is just survival, as one might expect, and we’ve now got a smaller group together in the high school attempting to do just that. Jughead’s return is met with an attempt on his life, thinking he was the Predator, and you can see the breakdown going on in the poor guys head as he just tries to survive. There’s some fun stuff here with him trying to keep to his usual personality, but with him running low and having low blood sugar, he’s on the down side and it’s falling apart quickly for him. Which works out well for the Predator, not that any of them are difficult targets. But it’s definitely a lot of fun in a creepy way watching how Juggie comes to an end in a way that even Veronica admits is pretty much how she thought he’d go.
The gang does get smaller beyond that with a few of the “teenagers of color” getting out of there since they know how this goes down, and that really just leaves Archie with Betty and Veronica and Dilton. This turns into some fun commentary in general since they’re all looking to Archie to figure it out, but Dilton is the one actually trying to do something about it and is saying out loud how ridiculous it is that everything seems to always revolve around Archie. Of course, Dilton’s efforts don’t pay off in the end, but you have to give the guy credit for mostly being smart about what he’s doing and going on the offense, since most everyone else is just reacting. He even gets in a good bit on the whole AVP acronym in a way that should make people grin. Sometimes being obvious is the best payoff.
In Summary:
Archie vs Predator continues to be a really fun title overall, even with its quiet start that put the pieces into motion. This installment whittles down the cas in a couple of different ways and it’s a lot of silly horror style fun done in the Archie style. It’s the kind of thing where yes, you do feel a bit bad for laughing at it and enjoying it, but you also can’t help but to enjoy it because it’s so well put together. The dialogue flows well, the snappy patter is spot on, as is the serious side of it, and the panel layouts keeps things dense where it needs to be to present the right kind of feeling. Combine that with the great artwork that brings it all to life and it’s got me grinning from ear to ear throughout.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: June 17th, 2015
MSRP: $3.50
