Archie vs. Sharknado #1 Reviews 

The Death of Trash Culture in “Archie vs. Sharknado” #1 [Review]

By | July 23rd, 2015
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Yesterday wasn’t just the premiere of Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! but the release of “Archie vs. Sharknado” #1. I’d give a tease of what we thought about this crossover, but the movie’s subtitle did the work for us. Read below for our review. Spoilers ahead!

Written by Anthony C. Ferrante & Dan Parent
Illustrated by Dan Parent & Rich Koslowski

It’s that time of year in Riverdale! The end of the school year. Time for beaches, barbecues, fun in the sun and… SHARKNADOS!?! That’s right, get ready as Archie and the gang brave the storm of a tornado full a sharks that riffs off the pop culture phenomenon known as Sharknado! The story unfolds as sharknados are spotted on the “Feast” Coast! Our heroines have to figure out how to get back to Riverdale, where the storm is about to hit next. Soon Archie and the gang go, go, go as they battle the Sharknado-ravaged Riverdale! Who will live? Who will die? Will this take a BITE out of the end-of-the-year prom? Uh….probably! The comic book action is also concurrent with the plot of SHARKNADO 3 and hits stands right before the film’s premiere in July on Syfy. Written by the SHARKNADO trilogy director Anthony C. Ferrante with Dan Parent.

Trash culture, the study and celebration of the merits of awful media, is vital to the survival of pop culture. In a world where “geek” properties like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead enjoy luxuries like “pretty good writing” and “budgets”, other underprivileged properties created by crazy people. Except these people never set out to make “crazy” movies. Tommy Wiseau was an idealist when he created The Room after a near-fatal car crash inspired him to become an actor. The Super Mario Bros. movie was the delightfully disastrous result of Hollywood executives blankly starring at an 8-bit video game and snorting mountains of cocaine until they figured out how to turn that shit into a movie. What’s important to note in these examples is how there seems to have been some modicum of effort into these films. Tommy Wiseau never wanted people to tweet about who awful The Room was. He wanted to be the next Marlon Brando.

In this modern era of trash culture, corporations and networks are seeking to generate the social media frenzy that comes from millennials discovering The Room for the first time. It’s much harder to make thousands of people tweet “I love this!” than “lol wtf?”. As a result, SyFy has made hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars off their deliberately so-bad-it’s-good Sharknado franchise. And last night, Sharknado 3 milked itself for all its worth with bold #branding moves like this TotalWireless spot. Not to be outdone, Archie Comics has decided to go completely off the rails with projects like “Afterlife With Archie” and “Archie vs. Predator”, the latter of which just wrapped up yesterday. Both companies have injected new life into their once-stagnant brands by embracing their innate cheesiness. So it’s no surprise they teamed up for “Archie vs. Sharknado” #1, a comic that sounds funny but doesn’t build on any of its premise towards anything meaningful.

“But James!” you disinterestedly think to yourself, “This is ‘Archie vs. Sharknado’! It’s not meant to be meaningful.” On one hand you’re sort of right, really passionate Sharknado and Archie fan. On the other hand, that type of reasoning seems to underestimate the capability of the creators involved, or the audience. “Archie vs. Sharknado” pointlessly on, going from set piece to set piece, slaughtering Riverdale’s teens with all the unexplained shark storms it can muster.

A quick note, as much as I don’t like the book, I do enjoy the implication that the citizens of Riverdale live in the same universe as Sharknadoes and are just kind of fine with it. There’s no great shock when the Sharknado comes they’re just like “Aw dang, this again!” which is coincidentally my opinion of Sharknado word for word.

Despite the outlandish amount of blood in “Archie vs. Sharknado”, there’s no real sense of threat from the sharks. They’re treated as a joke, rather than the genuinely terrifying creatures they are. Compare the persistent tongue-in-cheek attitude “Archie vs. Sharknado” #1 has to “Archie vs. Predator” #4 which came out the same day. The big fight in that comic is a lot more brutal, but also a lot more funnier because it’s wholesome 50’s teenagers fighting for their lives against an alien that fucked up Jesse “The Body” Ventura. When you play that shtick straight, it’s incredible. But when you go into a similarly ridiculous premise like “Archie vs. Sharknado” with a snicker on your face, unable to stop laughing at your own jokes, you become that annoying comedian who can’t stop laughing at their own jokes. You become the Jimmy Fallon of comic books. “Archie vs. Sharknado” is the Jimmy Fallon of comic books.

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It also doesn’t help that the art in “Archie vs. Sharknado” is all over the damn place. Any sense of motion between panels is nonexistent. And while that leads to some funny deaths (Sabrina just suddenly getting torn apart made me cackle) it still comes off as incredibly sloppy. There’s not a real sense of space so much as there is a bunch of characters floating around and dying. Speaking of which, they don’t even die in a semi-plausible way. Reggie gets crushed to death by a shark so his entire head explodes in a blood cloud while his body remains fine. Plus, characters will change in size from panel to panel. Like when Dilton shrinks down so he can french the janitor in front of everyone.

Just what the Sharknado ordered indeed.

If I seem irrationally upset at the events of “Archie vs. Sharknado” it’s because I feel betrayed. Other Archie crossovers like “Afterlife With Archie” have proven to be quite good. Heck, I’d unironically recommend the first Sharknado movie too. And I’d probably recommend “Archie vs. Sharknado” if there was any thought or effort put into it beyond the premise. That might sound harsh, but I can’t take any prisoners in a week where “Archie vs. Predator” was the best comic to be published. There comes a time when you have to get off your dead horse and find another one to beat to death.

Final Verdict: 3.4 – If you’ve seen the cover, you’ve seen all you ned from “Archie vs. Sharknado”. What might have been a clever comic in 2013 just seems redundant in a world where “wacky crossovers” have been handled with higher levels of craftsmanship. “Archie vs. Sharknado”, as well as the Sharknado brand as a whole, is another attempt by its creators to get some easy word of mouth press. And while there were some kind of funny moments, your attention is better spent on laughing at something that is genuinely trashy. Like that Left Behind movie on Netflix. Or my Twitter.


James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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