Starred Review Archie: The Married Life turned the Archiverse upside down to revelatory effect, so it's saying a mouthful that this latest gamble is even better. The cast is familiar chie, Betty, Veronica, Moose, etc. ough matured in both style and substance. (You'll encounter such verboten words as sexy and dammit.) It begins when Jughead's pet, Hot Dog, is killed by a car. He takes the carcass to Sabrina (you know, the teenage witch?), who, in a moment of pity, enacts a bit of necromancy. Hot Dog comes back, all right, but as a frothing devil-dog whose first victim is his owner. Zombie Jughead then storms the Halloween dance, eating Big Ethel in front of everyone and spawning the Riverdale plague, while the rest of our gang barricades themselves in Lodge Manor. The fact that this sounds humorous is Aguirre-Sacasa's best weapon: readers have 70 years' worth of warm memories to serve as sepia-toned flashbacks while Arch and the gang fall apart physically and mentally. Francavilla dials up the garish colors and compositions of comic-book horror, but it's the wrenching sadness that sticks with you; for example, Archie's bludgeoning of his undead dad is intercut with sweet memories of their life together. This is a tough, sad story of "our fearless, unlikely leader, a red-headed boy who has finally, at long last, become a man before our very eyes."