Creating a Context in “Afterlife with Archie”

The opening scene of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Francesco Francavilla’s “Afterlife with Archie” masterfully sets the tone for the series’ fantastically horrific yet emotionally harrowing revision of the #Archie comics universe. And it uses tricks specific to comics to do it. 1/9

A blood-spattered prologue declares, “This is how the end of the world begins…” This allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” hybridizes high art with so-called low art (horror fiction) & introduces once-unthinkable concepts to the world of Archie—time, change, and endings. 2/9

The following two pages of the opening sequence underscore what the prologue already teases, combining and alternating between self-conscious genre hybridity and overt, intentionally shocking inversions of what we customarily expect from the world of Archie. 3/9

Francavilla’s flat, simplified colours, dominated by orange, blue & black with both diegetic & non-diegetic textures of blood spatter, evoke both Halloween & the similarly but differently simplified palettes of the source material, most notably, Archie’s iconic orange hair. 4/9

The visual and narrative details similarly merge and twist the familiar and the strange. Dutch Angles, common in horror films and comics, signal unease and inversion, yet the name on the door will be familiar to Archie fans—Spellman, the surname of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. 5/9

This first page also uses cropping & juxtaposition to build tension & establish a spooky context. Characters speak of covens & spells, and this aspect-to-aspect transition, showing an owl with red eyes against a full moon, suggests supernatural surveillance of fated events. 6/9

In addition, we never see any clear, full faces. We only see the feet of the frantic, running character and Sabrina’s aunts are shadowed. The extreme close-up on Sabrina’s face only shows her pupils dilated with shock, building anticipation for the page turn, which reveals… 7/9

The runner is Jughead, frantic to save Hot Dog, who’s been struck by a car. Seeing Jughead, a character strongly associated with goofy comedy, reacting naturalistically to a horrifyingly identifiable tragedy, is both grounded & shocking, and shocking *because* it’s grounded. 8/9

This is the alchemy of “Afterlife with Archie”—using the fantastical to illuminate Riverdale’s neglected humanity, then forcing us to reckon with how & why this newfound humanity is either/both affecting or disturbing. Future threads will continue unpacking these dynamics. 9/9