Originally Posted by Rev. Bob
Well, having been busy during Halloween, I was a bit late with my zombie/horror binge. (I needed something upbeat after the election!) Down the gullet went pretty much the entire Marvel Zombies metaseries - all five "core" miniseries, Return, Supreme, Destroy, and the three one-shots. Enjoyable enough for what they were, but basically fluff.
After that, I went on to read the first collection of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series (issues 1-5), followed by issue six. This is not something I'd ever expected to see from Archie Comics, and it's certainly not a series I'd hand to the stereotypical Archie reader. This Sabrina doesn't live in a wholesome, innocent world where magic is a neutral force, consequences never amount to much, and everything has a happy ending by the end of the issue. No, this Sabrina's origin was heavily (and explicitly) inspired by Rosemary's Baby, with a coven of Satan-worshipping witches bestowing fertility on an innocent woman in exchange for custody of her firstborn child... Sabrina. Betty and Veronica are also witches, but in a coven led by Miss Grundy, and their botched ritual summons the woman Sabrina's father was intended to marry.
It's heavy stuff, and sometimes gruesome, but it's a fine example of the genre. Whereas Marvel Zombies is basically "supers turn evil, stupid, and hungry," Sabrina's genuinely unsettling in several places. My biggest complaint is the slow pace of the Archie Horror release schedule; I've got five unread issues of Afterlife with Archie, but there are two more in the story arc and the second of those isn't due out until February.
At any rate, I'm almost at my end-of-year goal; I think I lack three books, so I'm sure I'll hit that. I'm not sure which books those will be yet, but that's okay. I might kick back with Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma, a comedic short story collection.
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