Archie and fiends

I was one of the kids who was always excited to go to the drugstore. Every time we went down to the local SavOn I would haul along the quarters and crumpled dollar bills I'd kept out of my lunch money to buy candy, Mad Magazine, or an Archie or Betty and Veronica Double Digest. My parents supported my comic book and fart-joke habit, and if I was a bit short they'd supplement my pile of change and I'd go home delighted to spend a couple of hours in Riverdale (or cackling at Spy Vs. Spy, depending on what was out that week).

But sometimes you just can't go home.

Kids have terrible taste. We can all agree on that, right? I recently watched a kid stick two straws in his mouth, one from a bottle of lemonade and the other from a glass of chocolate milk, and happily sip something that would have made a grownup puke. Kids are kind of stupid, and the people who make things for them realize that and so they make things that require fairly little effort because their audience is easily pleased.

At least that's the theory that I'm going with to explain the absolute pile of shit that is Archie Meets KISS.

I bought this comic for my dad. He's a big fan of KISS and has been taking my sister and I to KISS concerts since I was ten. Our family Christmas card once involved all of us putting on KISS makeup and smiling for the camera. We're a little bit into KISS, is what I'm saying.

I don't know that liking KISS is going to be enough to make up for how terrible Archie Meets KISS really is, though. I don't really have the energy to get into how stupid the plot is -

Fuck that, who am I kidding: The story is that Sabrina the Teenage Witch is trying to cast a protection spell over Riverdale for Halloween and Veronica fucks it all up and so a portal opens and four monsters who want to make Riverdale even less cool come through and start turning people into zombies. KISS comes through the portal a short time later and attempts to save the coolness of the town through the power of rock, helped out by the Archies. It is the most idiotic, most cynical cash grab that I've seen in a long fucking time. There is essentially nothing about the story that is good, WAY too much that is bad, and I feel bad for having read this.

That being said the interior cover pages are kind of way more bitchin' awesome than they have any right to be, and one of the stupid monsters is actually kind of funny.

But I still wish I had a better Father's Day present for my pop.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Segura, Alex. Pencils, Dan Parent. Inking, Rich Koslowski. Lettering, Jack Morelli.
     Coloring, Digikore Studios. Archie Meets Kiss. Archie Comic Publication.
     Momaroneck: New York. 2012.