Riverdale, Season 1/Jughead: The Hunger

Riverdale, Season 1 (CW, 2017) and Frank Tieri and Michael Walsh, Jughead: The Hunger (New York: Archie Comic Publications, 2017)

Since its conception in 1941 by John L. Goldwater and Bob Montana, the Archie Comic series has been known for its wholesome and comedic image. The characters are sweetnatured young teenagers who endure high-school tribulations with a lively spirit and a keen eye for zany adventures. The storylines centre on adolescence and are often successfully structured around slapstick humour. In contrast to the original series, however, the recent renditions of this fictional world - specifically both the television series Riverdale and the comic Jughead: The Hunger - are anything but comedic and wholesome. Long gone is the family-friendly spirit of the mid-twentieth-century comics; now, Archie and his friends are entering the darker and more sinister worlds of the twenty-first-century gothic.

Comic-book fans have been following the exploits of Archie and the gang since they made their first appearance. The original Archie cast is comprised of Archie Andrews, the allAmerican teenager; Betty Cooper, the sweet girl next-door; Veronica Lodge, the wealthy heiress; Jughead Jones, the sensible and witty best friend; and Cheryl Blossom, the attractive yet conniving classmate. At the height of superhero and fantastical comics' popularity, Goldwater created a series with which the adolescent readership of mid-twentieth-century America could identify.1 Through the years, the comic series has reinvented itself in various spin-off projects, such as the Americana comic series, which focuses on a range of different decades; the Archie Meets comic series, which centres on meeting various pop-culture artists; the Life with Archie comic series, set in alternate universe; the Weird Mysteries, a cartoon television series reminiscent of Scooby Doo; and many other adaptations that explore a variety of genres but all retain the wholesome light-hearted nature of the original series.

However, in October 2013, the Archie Comics company decided to take the comic series in a rather new and adult-centred direction by collaborating with horror writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrators Francesco Francavilla and Robert Hack to create the Afterlife with Archie (2013) comic series, set in an alternate horror realm, where a now-undead Jughead overruns Riverdale and initiates a zombie epidemic. Afterlife explores adult themes including sexuality, incest, and aggression, through the utilisation of...