Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

It's been a while since we've had a new issue of Afterlife With Archie, the flagship horror title from Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla that saw the zombie apocalypse hit Riverdale --- a full year, in fact, with the last issue hitting in May of 2015. Now, though, the book is set to return on May 25, and when it does, it's coming with a pair of issues that sound like they're being solicited by Stefon from Saturday Night Live.

After one of the most promising debuts in a long time, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack's spooky Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has been missing from shelves since its fourth issue came out in July of last year, one of only two issues to be released in 2015. Now, though, we are finally on the verge of its return. On May 18, Sabrina comes back with its fifth issue, and it's picking up right where it left off with Sabrina on trial for exposing witchcraft to a mortal. So really, if you've been waiting for the Archie comic that involves trial by red hot coals, multiple references to the Satanic Bible, and a Cthulhu monster being conjured up just to make a point about magical marriages, this is the one. Check out a preview!

If you're a fan of Archie's horror titles, then you've probably noticed that they haven't been around much lately. Despite critical acclaim and a new wave of interest from readers for the story of Riverdale's favorite teens making their way through the zombie apocalypse and everyone's favorite Teenage Witch recast as the heroine of a Lovecraftian horror story, 2015 only saw three issues of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina --- and only one of Afterlife With Archie. Now, though, it seems that our national nightmare is about to return. Today, Archie released their solicitations for May, promising the return of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack's Sabrina, followed shortly by Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla's Afterlife With Archie, staggering back from the grave on June 1.

The teens of Archie Comics are having a pretty weird week. In the past seven days, we've seen them deal with a sharknado that caused the vast majority of the cast to violently lose most of their limbs, and finish up an encounter with the Predator that saw pretty much everyone in the city of Riverdale dying in the most spectacularly violent way possible. Now, just in case that wasn't enough, things are about to get downright devilish. Next week marks the release of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina #4, and poor Harvey Krinkle arrives at the Spellman family's latest dark ritual --- and is followed up by some familiar faces from the next town over. Check out a preview below, including a pretty awesome variant cover based on the poster for Carrie!

A while back, the first issue of the newly relaunched The Black Hood made headlines pretty much everywhere --- including here at ComicsAlliance --- for being the first Archie Comics book to ever drop the f-bomb. Truly, it is a momentous occasion, but it seems that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla will not be outdone, because next week's Afterlife With Archie #8 is almost certainly the first Archie comic to ever use the word "twincest-y."

There are a lot of reasons to love what Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla are doing on Afterlife With Archie. There's the genuinely scary, atmospheric horror, the compelling character work that plays off the idea of horror movie archetypes, and the dark comedy that's inherent in taking America's favorite squeaky-clean teens and dropping them into an exceptionally violent and disturbing apocalypse. As for me, though, I'm mainly just in it for the deep-cut references to Archie's past. The latest issue delivered on all four fronts, as the gang departs Riverdale in an efort to escape the massive zombie horde led by Jughead -- a phrase that is truly a delight to type -- but there's also something else about it: It has a strong late contender for the best line of dialogue of 2014.

Archie Comics is on the move. Afterlife with Archie, the horror take on the Riverdale gang, garners acclaim wherever it goes -- after an initial “wait, the comics they sell at Stop N’ Shop?” double take, of course. Its sister book, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, promises to take the teen witch to the heights of 1960s-style psychological horror. Lena Dunham, fresh off her book tour, will pen a series for Archie in 2015. The publisher's new imprint, Dark Circle, will revive classic superheroes. Even dear old Riverdale is getting a shakeup, from Archie’s recent death in the Life With Archie series to a recently announced TV show. Though the gang’s teen shenanigans endure in every checkout line, their universe stretches far beyond the confines of Pep and Pals n’ Gals. As the publisher’s future grows ever more crowded with plans and announcements, ComicsAlliance sat down with CEO Jon Goldwater and chief creative officer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to discuss how they plan to honor their past while building a bold new future.

The Humble Bundle continues to be one of the best values in comic books, and as you might expect, this week they've turned their attention to the morespoooooky side of things. And by that, I mainly mean comics where Pinocchio uses his endless wooden nose to stab vampires. In addition to several books without pictures -- which I find strange and frightening -- the current Horror Book bundle added a bunch of horror comics today, including The Mocking Dead by Fred Van Lente and Max Dunbar, a volume of Valiant's Shadowman by Peter Milligan and Roberto de la Torre, the first omnibus of Dark Horse's Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, the first two issues of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla's Afterlife With Archie, and more.

Pretty soon we'll be surprised to find out that TV shows that aren't based on comics are being developed. The newest comics-based show coming to the airwaves is Riverdale, an Archie Comics series that has been picked up by Fox. Arrow and The Flash producer Greg Berlanti's production studio will produce the show, and the pilot will be written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Archie Comics' chief creative officer and writer of Afterlife with Archie. According to an Archie Comics press release, the show will be more like Twin Peaks than Leave it to Beaver.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with an oddball idea in the world of comics, but I have to imagine that it's a heck of a lot harder to do it twice in a row with very similar ideas -- which is exactly what Archie Comcis and writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa are trying to do in the pages of this week's Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina #1. A year after Aguirre-Sacasa teamed up with artist Francesco Francavilla and found critical and commercial success with Afterlife With Archie, where the familiar teenagers of Riverdale found themselves contending with the zombie apocalypse, he's joining artist Robert Hack to try to strike gold a second time -- not with a spinoff of Afterlife, but by expanding the horror line with an entirely new title, taking the same characters and twisting them around again. The result is a comic that dives headling into a world of horror, witchcraft and high school drama, and while it might not have the immediate eyebrow-raising hook of seeing Archie beat his zombified father to death with a baseball bat, it's definitely a pretty amazing comic that's hitting at exactly the right time.