2 out of 5

I fully appreciate that this is intended to be a novelty, as well as obviously a mash-up with an intentionally Z-grade flick, but… beyond the novelty, this wasn’t that great.  Archie and the gang ain’t new to oddball crossovers.  And true, it’s been some years since I’ve read an Archie comic, but for literal decades – having sample issues from the 60s through the 90s – Arch has maintained a fairly consistent “cheeky” sensibility, and while the art and plots were maybe never going to blow you away, they had a respectable workmanship to them.  Even those oddball crossovers very clearly existed within the Archie Universe – same tone, same pacing, just, hey, there’s the Punisher.

Now I know that the last several years have seen the book slowly updating its art style a bit, and I suppose the writing has had to get a bit more “modern” as well.  Still absolutely Archie (from when I’ve glanced at the book), but capable of not seeming like an anachronism.  With the success of Afterlife With Archie, we find ourselves in a position where we can get books like this – where killer shark tornados slaughter mass crowds of Archiekins and get slaughtered in turn by a stabby Betty and Veronica, liberal splashes of blood ev’rywhere.  I mean, I chuckled at some scenes (Sabrina, Jug’s hat), but where did that workmanship go?  Action-horror is definitely way outside of the norm for Archie artists (Dan Parent in this case), so we’ll excuse the really poorly choreographed sequences, but that doesn’t excuse how sloppy the writing felt.  Sure, I haven’t seen Sharknado (1, 2 or 3…), so maybe they’re aping the beats to the film.  If so, if and when I discover that, I’ll come back and amend this.  But I really don’t think that’s the case; I trust that Ferrante would have drawn a tad more attention to it… along with the fact that he’s the Sharknado director and not a comic book writer, so we’re really dealing with someone who has no clue about pacing.  And it shows.  …Although maybe that makes it funnier, that it actually is a Z-grade comic in that sense…

But I dunno.  There just wasn’t enough joy here.  A fun novelty.  Not a particularly entertaining one.