Archie vs Predator II #1: Will Anybody Make it Out Alive?

We couldn’t decide who should review this series, so I enlisted John Jack to help me out! He’s a Predator fan; I’m an Archie fan!

John Jack: We get a taste of multiversal madness as Betty and Veronica and their Archie/Predator hybrid (you’re really going to want read the first series before this for context) hit the road, ending up in vaguely familiar territory. The Predator angle of this issue is largely forsworn and instead replaced with some vaguely defined aforementioned Archie multiverse drama helping to incorporate the horrorverse and Riverdale universes. Although not quite there in terms of Predator, the stage is well set for a Yautja to carve a path of destruction across the Archieverse.

Cody White: The first thing I should say is that this book does not work isolated from the first volume. Any quick summary of the first volume is probably sufficient, but de Campi fails to really flesh out the Predator-turned-Archie in any way that fresh readers would be able to comprehend and that is a significant problem. Enlisting Robert Hack for art duties, however, quite nicely balances out that particular gaff.

If you haven’t been following the development of Archie Comics over the past decade or so, the publisher has been hard at work diversifying their content. The classic Archie publications still exist, full of one page gags and running jokes, but there is so much more to offer, most notably their range of horror comics. One of the highlights of the horror line was, of course, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was made into a television series for Netflix. All of this is to say that, in many ways, the Archieverse has been building a multiverse for quite some time but has had little to no focus on how these disparate universes would interact. Until now.

While the artistic style is rooted in the Archie horrorverse, the tone veers closer to the CW iteration of Riverdale mixed with a heavy helping of classic Archie. Seeing all of these elements combine is the strength of the book.