Mike Fleming

Afterlife With ArchieEXCLUSIVE: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the Glee scribe who helped fix the troubled Broadway musical Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark, has signed on to write a new line of the venerable Archie Comics. And he’s found a way to inject a topical sensibility into the adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead: flesh eating zombies! Aguirre-Sacasa will write Afterlife With Archie, which ponders a zombie apocalypse in Riverdale. This will run alongside the usual lines of Archie Comics, but if you ask me, it’s exactly what Riverdale needed.

Here’s how it happens: 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. Aguirre-Sacasa certainly knows horror: he scripted the upcoming remake of Carrie that stars Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore.

Aguirre-Sacasa said the new comic line “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.” He said the gore will be balanced with “elements that are quintessentially Archie.”