Archie Horror Presents: The Cursed
Library #0
Cover: Robert Hack
“The Cursed Library”
Story: Magdalene Visaggio
Line Art: Craig Cermak
Colors: Glenn Whitmore
“Rosemary's Babysitter”
Story: Micol Ostow
Line Art: Laura Braga
Colors: Ellie Wright
“Night Shift”
Story: Ryan Cady
Line Art: Chris Panda
Colors: Wright
“The Cult of That Wilkin Boy”
Story: Cullen Bunn
Pencils: Dan Schoening
Inks: Ben Galvan
Colors: Matt Herms
Lettering: Jack Morelli
Editor: Jamie Lee Rotante
Associate Editor: Stephen Oswald
Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo
Published by: Archie
Released: May 6, 2023
So for the last two #FreeComicFridays, I've gone with a Scooby-Doo team-up and an all-ages story featuring adorable animals, robots, etc. They were both Halloween ComicFest giveaways but, unless you're Shaggy or Scooby, they weren't very spooky. Let's change things up this week with a Free Comic Book Day issue from … Archie?
Now, if you're an avid comic reader, that probably won't surprise you. If you're more familiar with Archie comics from those digests at the grocery store, or if you're adolescent me, then it might.
Archie followed that up in 2014 with “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” and the year after that with its own horror imprint, including “Jughead: The Hunger,” featuring the title character as a werewolf, and “Vampironica,” featuring, you guessed it, Betty Cooper as a mummy. While not technically part of the horror line, in 2015, they also published “Archie vs. Predator,” which was an honest-to-goodness, R-rated Predator story drawn in the classic Archie style. I don't know what the deal was with “Riverdale;” the ads never made me want to watch it for a second.
My point is, Archie hasn't just been kids' stuff for a while now. So I decided to check out “The Cursed Library”** for a little darker Halloween offering.
The story is framed by the cover girl, a teenager named Jinx, with dark tastes and maybe dark secrets? She's narrating right through the fourth wall when her friend Danni enters and wonders to whom she's speaking. Jinx pushes her guest aside and leads us into a sampler story from “Betty: The Final Girl,” a one-shot I'd heard of at some point.
Getting away for a girls weekend with Veronica, Betty finds herself unwittingly babysitting her friend's cousin Leroy. After watching a horror movie while Veronica goes to get food, she dozes off soon after her charge and dreams she's … babysitting, only for a kid named Rosie in a high-tech smart house. Cliched horror movie stuff happens, including the doorbell ringing but nobody's there and text messages asking if she's checked on the children. Soon, she's being pursued by a shadowy, antelered entity, who we also saw lurking behind her when she fell asleep.
Just as the creature catches up to her and Rosie, she wakes up to find Veronica is back. Betty goes to check on Leroy, and the doorbell rings. Veronica answers it to find... Betty... just getting there, prompting her to wonder, just who's been watching cousin Leroy.
This confused me. The dream within the dream was hard to follow, even moreso when you try to reconcile the ghost story twist ending with the fact that the whole story was told from the alleged Betty's perspective. Since this was an excerpt, I have to wonder if there's more context in the full story.
The next installment, “Night Shift,” is from “Pop's Chock'lit Shoppe of Horrors.” It finds Archie's pal Kevin Keller working the night shift at Pop's diner, where he caters to increasingly weirder and more grotesque clientele. The moral of the story seems to be in Pop's note, saying “as with all customers, only one thing matters. Be polite, and you'll be fine.” Kevin tries.
As a short horror vignette using a familiar, to regular Archie readers anyway, character and setting, I guess it works.
The final excerpt is from the intriguingly titled “The Cult of That Wilkin Boy.” We meet superstar musician Bingo Wilkin as an interviewer describes his meteoric rise to fame and notes the seventh anniversary of his first single release is coming up. This milestone seems to trouble Bingo, who we see in a flashback was a member of a struggling band before taking undisclosed steps that probably involved selling his soul or some other nefarious bargain. We see a new up-and-comer named Clyde Didit is also rocketing to game, then Bingo receives a visitor speaking with a spooky word balloon.
The issue closes out with Danni trying to take over Jinx's hosting duties after her friend went to answer the door and coming to the realization the library might actually be cursed.
Of the three featured tales, I'm mildly curious about “Betty: The Final Girl,” if only to see if the part I read makes more sense there. “The Cult of That Wilkin Boy” seems like it could be an interesting take on the deal-with-the-devil story but I'm not eager to read it nor do I have any aversion to doing so eventually. The Chock'lit Shoppe story had atmosphere, but nothing I want to seek further.
Granted, I'm not the target audience. I like to look for scary movies and stories that intrigue me – Stephen King and Dean Koontz do the trick in prose – but I'm not a fan of the horror genre in general.
The timeline of Archie horror was interesting until I noticed a lot of the stories reference Hell, there's a character named Madam Satan and one features Jason and Cheryl Blossom competing to be the Antichrist. Jinx also refers to herself at one point as “the Satan girl.” Now, judging a comic book or character by a name or reference alone didn't work out for me where Hellboy was concerned, but none of these piqued my interest.
So, from my perspective at least, this Free Comic Book Day entry didn't draw me to anything I wasn't already curious about before (namely werewolf Jughead and vampire Veronica). It actually makes me more hesitant to check out any Archie Horror projects, since nothing here caught my attention like the “Afterlife” and “Predator” stories and some was a bit off-putting. Bonus points, though, for the timeline of Archie's horror history.
* - It also never finished, which is kind of frustrating.
** - See what I did there?
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