Frank Doyle

The thing you need to understand about Riverdale is that people there don't react to things with the normal levels of emotions. I mean, that's pretty obvious, right? The entire town --- the entire universe in which that town resides --- is built around the idea that this one teenager is so irresistibly alluring that it has resulted in a 75-year love triangle with dozens of characters caught in its orbit, and even if you're going by the upcoming TV show's version of Archie and his abs, that kind of all-consuming conflict is a little difficult to believe. In Riverdale, overreacting is just, you know, reacting. Which is how you get stories like the one where Veronica Lodge gets hit by a snowball and then very seriously threatens to murder an entire town.

As we approach the end of 2015, I thought it would be a nice time to head back into the archives and find a good story about New Year's Eve and all the good tidings that go with it. There aren't as many as there are for Christmas or Halloween But there's a funny thing about going to look for holiday stories. Sometimes, you find a story about Auld Acquaintances, resolutions, countdowns and all that stuff. And sometimes, you find a story that takes an inexplicable second act twist into mud-wrestling and then reveals that Cheryl Blossom exists in defiance of God Himself. Which, if we're being honest, wasn't actually all that surprising.

The last year or so of Archie comics has been defined by one thing: the supernatural. Not only did we get Afterlife With Archie, which saw Sabrina the Teenage Witch dabbling in necromancy and inadvertently bringing about a zombie apocalypse that saw Jughead ripping out throats at a school dance, but it was so popular that we got a separate ongoing series about Sabrina dealing with the Lovecraftian horrors that result from witchcraft. To the casual reader, this might seem like it's a pretty big departure from the usual Archie storylines about sharing milkshakes and having too many dates to the movies, but those of us who really know Archie Comics know that it's been there all along. Or, at the very least, it's been there since 1962, in that story where Betty Cooper literally sold her soul to the Devil so that she could make out with Archie.