Book-Thirsty Thursday: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

It’s time to get a little spooky for Book-Thirsty Thursday, as we’re looking at Archie Horror’s ongoing Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Diving into comics sometimes feels a little intimidating. Especially with the big superhero houses, there are so many different continuities and titles and runs that you almost want to sit down and just kind of give up before you ever begin. Trust me, I’ve been there. But there are other comics out there, readers, and some of them don’t even have superheroes! Archie — yes, that Archie — has its own mini line of horror comics, and today, one of those series is what we’ll be talking about for Book-Thirsty Thursday. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which features Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa as its writer, is scarily fun to read.

If you recognize the name, that’s because Aguirre-Sacasa also happens to be Riverdale‘s creator and one of its executive producers and writers. Let’s sum it up like this. If you dig Riverdale‘s weird retro-feeling world, Chilling Adventures will appeal to you even more, because it literally transplants Sabrina Spellman and her aunts into the ’60s.

But, if you’re coming into this expecting the ’90s TV series but in comic book form, you’re going to find yourself quite surprised. Chilling is not in the title for fun, readers. Not at all. Sabrina is an actual witch with literal dark powers, and the comic as a whole plays these ties to the very hilt. The comic has a 15+ rating and it’s well-earned; the first few pages of issue #1 get that across.

We’re now into issue #8 of the series, which just dropped on Aug. 16, and it ramps up a conflict that makes us wish we had the ninth issue to read already. It’s that good. We can’t quite tell you what exactly that conflict is, for fear of spoilers, but can you say no to Sabrina raising the dead? On purpose?

Of course, Salem’s here too, to offer advice to the teenage Sabrina, and he gets his own brief comic as a backstory. That’s another great strength of Chilling Adventures. It’s more than willing to use flashbacks and explain how exactly some things came to be.

Another thing I dig is that the comic is willing to pull in Sabrina’s more famous publishing-house cousins over in the town of Riverdale. Betty and Veronica show up, as do Jughead and Archie, commenting on things, even participating in the plot here and there.

We’d also be remiss if we didn’t talk about the illustrations of Robert Hack. Fitting with the retro setting, Hack has a throwback art style that often washes backgrounds out in oranges and yellows, letting dark and light hair colors alike pop, as well as red — and there’s a lot of red. (Horror comic, remember?) He brings a lot of dark visions talked about in Aguirre-Sacasa’s writing to terrifying life.

With just eight issues to get through (and the first five already collected into a handy-dandy graphic novel), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is the kind of scary comic that might just entice non-comics readers to dive in and give comics enthusiasts something a little creepier than the usual fare.

We mentioned earlier that Archie Horror is a mini-line itself. The other is the more famous Afterlife with Archie, which may or may not have an impact on Riverdale. But for this reader’s money, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which focuses more on women — even a major antagonist is a woman — has the kind of story that isn’t told quite as often as your standard rise of the zombies, and has Hack’s fantastic art behind it …

Next: How growing diversity might save comics

Yeah, we’re picking Chilling Adventures. But if you like it, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Afterlife with Archie, too.