After the success of Archie Comics‘ horror mash-up Afterlife With Archie, what’s next? Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is what’s next, as writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa teamed up with artist Robert Hack for the perfect — you guessed it — chilling treat this Halloween season.
Only loosely connected to the series, it follows Sabrina, a teenage witch, as she comes of age and is forced to choose whether to join her dark coven or embrace her human half and be banned from witch society forever. While Afterlife leaned into the wild gore of the zombie genre, Chilling Adventures is a dark riff on stories like Rosemary’s Baby, or other cult/witch classics, while still playing off the iconic Archie Comics characters.
What makes Chilling Adventures so unique isn’t just Aguirre-Sacasa’s intimate knowledge of Archie history, but Hack’s dark, realistic art that embraces the darkness of the subject matter while still managing to create connective fiber with the brightness of Greendale from the original source material. And his skull-eyed villain Madam Satan is one for the ages, an iconic image from the get-go.
The one knock? The series has had a weird publication history. After eight issues were released on a sporadic schedule, the comics were adapted into a live-action Netflix series… And then canceled, leaving both the comic and TV series on cliffhangers. A ninth issue of the Chilling Adventures comic was released in 2021 — though that also left things open for more. And as of this writing, a continuation of the TV show in comic form titled The Occult World of Sabrina was also announced in 2021, but was never released.
So the scariest part of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina? It’s so good it’ll make you delve into devilish magic, hoping to conjure up more.
It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time to curl up with a comic book or graphic novel that will scare your socks off. With that in mind, we’re posting a new horror book to check out every day of October, for our 31 Days Of Halloween Comics. Awoooo! Looking for the rest of our picks? Check them out on the Halloween tag.
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