Greetings Canadians and lesser people, and welcome to another week here at Comics! The Blog. We hope your Real Thanksgiving is going well, and wish you and yours a happy blood sacrifice. Remember, the blood letting needs to begin by 8:03 pm local standard time, unless you wish to be devoured whole by our great thunder gods. (B)

THIS IS HOW THE END OF THE WORLD BEGINS

The world is perpetually poised on the brink of destruction. Despite the fact that I’ve been bringing that up quite frequently at the blog as of late, I rarely think about that fact. You can’t. You would go absolutely crazy if your thoughts were constantly consumed by gloom and doom. That’s why we build pockets of happiness to escape into. That’s why we laugh at our television sets or become consumed with fictional drama - we love the idea of the unreal because we can turn it off or change its tune whenever we fancy. It’s a beautiful system.

However.

Sometimes you stumble across a bit of fictional drama that jars you. Sometimes it’s because it strikes a little too close to home and the fiction turns the spotlight back on the world you were trying to avoid. Other times, it’s because someone has taken a safe idea and has built something… different with it. That difference is not necessarily scary, but it definitely turns something familiar into something that isn’t. Such is the case with this week’s stellar Afterlife with Archie, which turns Riverdale into patient zero for the apocalypse.

Of all the place in the world, and of all the people in the world, who would have thought that Riverdale and its residents would be our downfall? Yes: the teens have always been mixed up in some strange adventures, sometimes messing with magic or time or the fabric of existence, but at the end of the day, the good within them always triumphs over the bad that threatens everything. So how would this idealic place, and these good people bring about the end? The answer is surprisingly simple: the end begins from an overpowering sense of loss. The story opens with a panicked Jughead who arrives at Sabrina’s house with Hot Dog lying lifeless in his arms. It appears as though someone has hit the poor guy with their car, setting this whole morbid affair in motion. Unfortunately, when the pair arrive, Hot Dog has already passed, and Sabrina and her aunts can’t save him. Jughead begs for them to do something - anything - but the witches pass with heavy hearts. Blacker arts could do something, but the results wouldn’t be desirable. Jughead leaves distraught, making one final appeal to Sabrina for help.

This is how the end of the world begins - with heartache, and compassion. How very Riverdale.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is no stranger to the Archie universe. Almost a year ago, he penned the Archie Meets Glee storyline that appeared on a lot of people’s radars. He also wrote a play called Archie’s Weird Fantasy wherein Archie and Jughead come out of the closet and move to New York to start a new life together. A brief aside about that play: before it could open, Archie Comics issued a cease and desist order on the grounds that the depiction of Riverdale could possibly dilute and tarnish the character’s image. The play was then changed to Weird Comic Book Fantasy wherein the names of the characters were changed. Needless to say, going from that moment, to a point in time where the same playwright is writing an ongoing zombie apocalypse Archie book was a strange and improbable journey - and yet here we are.

The story itself fits in perfectly with established characterizations and motivations - albeit tweaked slightly for the genre. For instance, when Hilda and Zelda (Sabrina’s aunts) get mad at their niece for dabbling in the darker arts, they don’t just get mad - they get scary. Francesco Francavilla renders the characters as meanacing floating creatures with twisted features, quite unlike their previous incarnations. This is probably the most dramatic change to the series (beyond, you know, the zombie stuff) as the rest of the characters embody their normal looks and feel through out the entire read. Aguirre-Sacasa navigates a minefield of characterization and plotting astounding ease, while Francavilla melds the Archie house style in with his own, making for something terribly familiar… and terribly, unsettlingly different. The result, is one of the best comics of the week, if not the year. I look forward to seeing where this team takes the story next. Regardless, everyone involved in this fine title recieve this week’s REM Was Right Award. (B)

MILLER TIME

I have a conflicted relationship with the works of Frank Miller. While I can often appreciate their gorgeous artistic qualities, I often get tripped up by the writing, which… uh… doesn’t always espouse ideas that I’m a fan of. Let’s go with that one. One of the reasons it was hard to really embrace 300 was because when I was a kid, my social studies class taught us a bit of ancient Sparta’s complicated history, so to see a very complicated culture presented in such emphatically simple, macho way took me out of the narrative too much to fully enjoy it. Three #1, released last week, is in many ways the result of that same kind of response, a fuller image of Sparta from Kieron Gillen, Ryan Kelly, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles.

You are going to learn while you read is what I am saying.

Of course, you can get to Gillen‘s rather wonderful backmatter without realizing any of this, as the issue is of course set up to be an action comic and not a textbook. It’s remarkably efficient, delivering great characterization of the Krypteia and of the Helots in a way that explains their background, infuses the comic with urgency and a genuine sense of dread as the issue’s final scene progresses. Ryan Kelly, always a great visual storyteller, gives some of his most distinctive work yet as he needs only a few scenes to visually characterize the main cast with incredible clarity. Even the quiet scenes have an air of grim, violent predetermination to them, as if the world itself knows how inevitable the final pages are.

As always, not enough good things can be said about Jordie Bellaire, who remains one of the supreme colourists of the comics medium, whose palette with Three is gorgeous and perfectly in-sync with the rest of her collaborators. The scenes with only the Helots have a drab, washed-out character that underscores the futility of life as a slave, while the scene with the members of the ruling class themselves flicker with warm, threatening colours. The way the colours, character expressions and dialogue come together in the climactic scene is great in its dread and execution. In such a system, this was always the only result.

Man, fuck Sparta.

But hey, the book is great! It’s only the first issue, but the creative team members are such evidently great partners, and the ideas of the book so clearly expressed, that it’s easy to be excited for what comes next. Learning, I’ll bet. But also blood. So far, it’s definitely earned this week’s This Book Has Some Ideas Award. (J)

The future is here, and she’s wearing a jet pack.

Dayoung Johansson is a 15 year year old time cop in New York City. From her place in the far flung future (2013!), she’s detected quite a bit of insider time travel usage from a company by the name of Quintum Mechanics. In her time, it’s a strong company that runs nearly everything. Back in the 80s, however, they were just starting to discover time travel. The book opens with Dayoung convincing her superiors to allow her to go back in time and prevent Quintum from using time travel to firm up with corporate structure. She’s Rocket Girl, and this is her story.

Regular readers of the site will know that I wrote about this book on the day it was released. It’s an okay piece, but one born out of immediacy; I had just finished reading the issue, and my thoughts hadn’t entirely crystallized. Luckily, it was the best thing that I read this week, so a revisitation was in order.

The book immediately sets itself apart by tying the action in very specific and odd time frames. The “present” (as the captions note) is the year 1986. With this simple notation, the creators are free to shoot forward into the year 2013 (which for narrative purposes, is listed as “the past”), where 20 year old cops have been building their pension for 7 years, and time travel related crimes merit investigation rather than scoffs and eye rolls. With these eras established, the book can dig its hands into all the fun parts of the 80s - it’s syle, it’s culture, and even it’s ideas of what the year 2013 might look like. It’s a book that plays off the best of movies like Back to the Future, where the primary goal was fun, even when the stakes were dire.

Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare are doing something wonderful with this book. Beyond the great deal of craft they’re bringing to the pages, there’s a sense of great fun and wonder at play, one that deliberately invokes stories from a generation’s childhood. Tying the book, even tangentially, to this era and this style of storytelling allows the brain to push past the adult part of the brain that has trouble separating reality from fiction (see: people who are at this very second complaining about how this fictional story doesn’t jive with their totally legit thoughts about time travel) and taps into that beautiful place we all lived when we were children, where everything was possible if you could only imagine it. This is a book built from the boundless imagination of two highly accomplished storytellers that is asking you to stop being so god damn grown up and enjoy a story about a teen cop from the future as envisioned by the 80s. It’s fun, and brilliant, and most importantly, compelling enough for me to persue further. I can’t wait to see where Dayoung goes from here, and what will result from her actions. Here’s hoping there will be stories for many, many months to come.