Riverdale’s 100-Year-Old Cult Officially Sends Archie Straight to Hell in New Release

Iconic comic book teenager Archie Andrews is a long-time resident of the idyllic small town of Riverdale. However, in recent years, he’s branched out, finding himself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse in Afterlife With Archie, and in the midst of a sexy love quadrangle on the CW’s Riverdale. Now, he’s more out of his element than ever in the new comics series Archie in Hell, which sends the red-headed every-teen exactly where the title implies. Issue hit store shelves this week, and now Collider is proud to exclusively present a new sneak peek of issue , which will be released next month.

The book is one of the first that longtime Archie publisher, Archie Comics (the company was originally MLJ Comics before renaming itself after its flagship character in 1946), is publishing in partnership with indie comics company Oni Press. The publisher relaunched the main Archie ongoing series with writer W. Maxwell Prince and artists Fábio Moon and Nick Cagnetti in September, then Sabrina the Teenage Witch last month, with writer Corinna Bechko and artist Kano. This month, writer Patrick Horvath and artist Tyler Crook launched the third title, Archie in Hell. In that first issue, they revealed that a secret sinister cult has been manipulating the people of Riverdale for a century, and they need one final human sacrifice to bring their fearsome plans to fruition: Archie Andrews!

Now, in Archie in Hell , Archie’s been hurled back in time to Riverdale’s earliest days in Colonial America! He may find analogues of all his pals and gals there, but he also finds superstition and paranoia about witchcraft. Can he find his way back to the modern day, or will he get burned at the stake? You’ll find out on December 16 when Archie in Hell hits stores, courtesy of Horvath (Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees) and Crook (Harrow County), with covers by Crook, Dustin Weaver, Jonathan Case, Abigail Harding, Dan Parent, and Patricia Martín.

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
  conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
  doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
  until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
  them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
  rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
  other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
  meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
  more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
  it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
  stop hiding.

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
  days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
  decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
  enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
  same way.

What’s Next for Archie Andrews?

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

• Image via Oni Press

For the first time, Archie is set to come to the big screen in an all-new animated movie, courtesy of The Lego Movie‘s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Meanwhile, Archie’s most horrific adventure is coming to the small screen. Afterlife With Archie, the Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa–Francesco Francavilla comic book that unleashed a plague of the undead on Riverdale, is getting a TV adaptation on Disney+ in time for next year’s Halloween.

Archie in Hell will be released in comic book stores everywhere on December 16, 2026; issue is on shelves now. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.