Archie Horror: Post Five: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

First and foremost, it is important to view Archie Horror as an imprint, like Wildstorm or Vertigo, rather than a shared universe like Marvel. Although the different titles begin with characters from Archie Comics, they are not meant to be the same characters across all titles. The Sabrina in Afterlife with Archie (AwA) is clearly a different Sabrina than the one in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (CAoS). Part of how this is shown currently is by having different artists for each title, so while AwA has the Francavilla style, CAoS is given a far different look by Robert Hack.

The first issue follows Sabrina through her childhood and ends up being set in the mid 60s, so we're immediately in a really interesting and specific time period. The witches in the series are definitely the Horror genre standards, worshiping the devil and pledging him their souls (sorry fans of Hilda and Zelda, but these aunts are pretty terrifying). Sabrina is a half witch, half human and the first arc (titled The Crucible) follows her in the last few days before her sixteenth birthday when she's set to devote her life to darkness as her aunts have.

The series has a really great feel to it, and also includes shout outs to a number of horror films and books with similar themes, like Rosemary's Baby and others.

It is fair to say that this title, as with AwA is definitely not for children - there are incidents of extreme violence and not all of your favourite characters necessarily make it through each issue, but the narrative is really intriguing and I'm really interested to see how much of the source material will be making it into the Netflix adaptation later this week.