Since 2015, the iconic Archie Comics has delved deep into a dark new world with Archie Horror, including with their premium event Archie Comics: Judgment Day. Cemetery Dance spoke with editor Jamie Rotante about Judgment Day, how Archie works in the world of horror, and the character archetypes that allow them to be in different scenarios.
(Interview conducted by Danica Davidson)
CEMETERY DANCE: What can you tell us about Archie: Judgment Day?
JAMIE ROTANTE: Archie: Judgment Day is a premium event. Typically what we’ve been doing for the past few years are one-shots and anthologies. So our one-shots are self?-stories, about 20 pages, usually centered on a character or just a topic. And then our anthologies are a bunch of short-form horror stories. Archie Comics: Judgment Day is our first three-issue miniseries. There’s a bunch of extra things that give it that premium sort of element to it as well, like our paper quality, covers, and special features.
Judgment Day is a really interesting story. It centers on Archie Andrews. The apocalypse has descended on Riverdale, and Archie is the person tasked with deciding who lives and who dies. It’s funny to say it that way, because it’s such an extreme and absurd sort of topic and scenario, and Archie is known for being kind of a klutz, kind of lovesick. Putting him into this position where he has the most important job at the end of the world could lend itself to comedy or to humor, but it doesn’t. This is played as straight as you can imagine.
Riverdale is overrun with demons, but Archie is having to make sacrifices and having to make these decisions that no one should have to make. He has to look at all the people he knows and loves and decide, have they been corrupted by demons past a point of being saved, or is there still a chance? And we see through each issue that this task starts to corrupt him more and more as well.
The series is written by Aubrey Sitterson and drawn by Megan Hutchison. What a fantastic team. The demon designs by Megan are haunting, and Aubrey is wonderful because he’s so good at world-building and he takes the Riverdale that people know and love, that’s preestablished and its characters, and really pulls out their worst qualities for the ones that are corrupted by demons and really places it at the End Times in a way that’s just devastating. He previously worked with us on a one-shot called Archie VS the World, which is also kind of a postapocalyptic story. That one was a little more Mad Max, but he did such a great job that we knew we could trust him with something of this caliber. And this was his first-ever horror writing experience for comics as well and you would never know it. He just he nailed it.
How does Judgment Day fit within the wider realm of Archie Horror?
At Archie we have a funny saying in-house: “Everything is canon and nothing is canon.” We’ve been around for almost 85 years, and we’ve never had continuity as a really big cornerstone for us. So things can happen, they can go away, they could come back. What we’ve been doing for the past few years, as I mentioned, have been those one-shots. They all exist within their own worlds, but there’s been a little bit of a thread where they kind of, as much as they are in their own self-contained worlds, they could build and do build to a larger storyline and I could talk more on that later. Judgment Day is very much in its own world and very much a self?contained, three-issue story. It’s similar to how we’ve had the Afterlife with Archie in the past and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. They’re kind of in their own self?contained universes. Judgment Day is one of those as well.
How do you approach an iconic brand like Archie that has a wholesome connotation to it and then put a horror twist to it and make it work?
Thankfully, I’ve been doing that a lot. Ever since we rebooted the main Archie comic back in 2015, we’ve really had a lot of fun with placing these characters in all sorts of different worlds and universes. The first comic I ever wrote for Archie was Betty & Veronica Vixens, which was Betty and Veronica starting an all-female motorcycle gang. So I feel like even before I stepped into the role as Senior Director of Editorial, just from a writing perspective, I got very well acquainted with taking these characters and throwing them into unlikely scenarios. The big thing we always say is that, “What’s wonderful about the Archie characters is their archetypes are so defined and so strong that you can change the background and the core of the characters remains the same.”
So, when you take these characters out of their wholesome universes and you put them into horror or you put them into sci?fi, apocalypse, fantasy, anything, they are so well defined you can get an idea of how they’re going to act. You know Veronica has resources, she’s rich. So she’s very steadfast and she has a lot of people she can call and things she can do. If you put her in a horror situation, she’s going to last a little bit longer because she has that. Betty is determined. Betty is a self-starter. We did an anthology last year called Betty the Final Girl because she’s kind of your ultimate final girl. And then Archie is just so focused, not on survival for himself, but for all the people he loves, and that’s something we’ve really hammered home with Archie over the past few years: how much he loves his community, his friends, his family, that he is going to do whatever it takes to survive. And when you put these characters in horror, even if they’re corrupted themselves, even if they start displaying villain-like behavior, you can always go to the core personality traits that they’re identified by and they just work so well. Writer Aubrey Sitterson so often said that it’s because those characters are so defined and those archetypes are so solid that he had no problem putting them in this very, very unlikely situation.
Do you have a background with horror comics, like reading or writing them?
Really just for Archie. I’ve been at Archie now for 14 years. I was very much in the background at Archie when we got thrown into doing horror. But we soon realized that people really like horror comics from Archie. I’ve really grown with horror comics through Archie. So my own personal taste, I’ve just always been a big fan of the anthology format, like classic EC stuff. I’m a big Halloween fan, of the franchise but mostly of the holiday itself. My personal experience, outside of Archie with horror, has just been from a fan perspective.
Where can people find out more about Judgment Day and other Archie horror titles?
ArchieComics.com. You can buy all three issues now. You can get them individually, or as a bundle. And we have so much more horror on the way. We just launched our second premium event, which is The Cursed Library. The first issue just came out, the second one’s coming out on October 23. We’re releasing them on a bimonthly schedule just to give people time to digest and to gear up for the next one. And that story, as I kind of alluded to before, is a culmination of a lot of our horror one-shots over the past few years. So though they all exist in their own self-contained universes, there’s been little hints at a bigger storyline building and this event is the culmination of quite a few of them. It’s sort of our superhero team-up book, except it’s not superheroes, it’s horror characters, perfect for going into the Halloween season.
I’m really happy to see more people learning about Archie’s horror offerings. We’ve been doing it pretty steadily for the better part of a decade now and it’s just amazing how horror fans have been really open to a comic company like Archie getting in on horror. And we really take it seriously, even when we do these one-shots. We’re not trying to play it off as a gimmick or a laugh. We really present every single one as a story we hope that horror fans really enjoy and really want to see more of.
