Even Riverdale Isn’t Safe from a Zombie Apocalypse! Afterlife with Archie Comic Book Is Coming!

Steve Barton   |  

Mar 6, 2013

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No matter how much people complain the zombie craze has reached a saturation point, something comes along and you realize it still has yet to fully hit its zenith. Take for example Afterlife with Archie, an upcoming comic book in which Riverdale gets The Walking Dead treatment.

You just can’t make this stuff up anymore. Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and the rest of the Riverdale kids will be forced to contend with zombies in a new comic book series launching later this year. It sounds like the basis for a Teefury mash-up shirt, doesn’t it? Nope. This is actually happening, and here’s how:

Jughead’s beloved pooch Hotdog is run over by Reggie in his roadster. He convinces Sabrina to hatch a spell to bring back the pooch, but when Hotdog bites Jughead, he soon craves flesh.

Deadline reportsAfterlife with Archie will be scripted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. He seems to be the perfect scribe for the job as he has experience writing about teenage life, having worked on “Glee”. He also has experience with teen horror, having penned the screenplay for the upcoming Carrie remake. And he know a little something about trying to make the best out of a potentially ill-conceived idea, having been the fix-it man brought in to try to salvage the initially disastrous Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Aguirre-Sacasa told Deadline that this comic book “combines two of my great passions, Archie comics and horror comics. This series came out of conversations with Jon Goldwater, asking questions like ‘What if the Archie characters found themselves in a Stephen King novel like The Stand or a Sam Raimi movie like The Evil Dead? Could we pull that off, tonally?’ We’re really going for it. The first arc is called Escape from Riverdale. The second arc is called, brace yourself, Betty RIP.”

We’re also told to expect the gore aspect to be combined with elements that are “quintessentially Archie”.

Why do I have a weird feeling that if this comic book is successful within six months of publication I’m going to find myself writing a story about how Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton have optioned the movie rights?

I personally hope that Afterlife with Archie expands its universe to also include other old timey comic book characters that would fit in amongst the zombie apocalypse. Like have Casper, the Friendly Ghost guiding the Riverdale kids to safety in a world now overrun by the undead. Dennis the Menace shows up as their version of “The Governor,” armed with a lethal slingshot and with the head of Mr. Wilson in a jar that he still talks to. Do a story arc where they hide out in Richie Rich’s panic room, but that goes bad when the world’s richest boy decides he doesn’t want to die a virgin and develops an unhealthy obsession with Veronica. Have the storyline conclude with the reveal that Sabrina deliberately unleashed hell on earth because she’s now the mistress of Hot Stuff. I mean, Hot Stuff is a little boy devil; he’s bound to go evil at some point.

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