Riverdale Presents South Side Serpents

Riverdale Presents South Side Serpents

Archie Comics 2021

Written by David Barnett

Illustrated by Richard Ortiz

Coloured by Matt Herms

Lettered by Jack Morelli

FP Jones is worried for the future of the Southside Serpents. The biker gang is getting old and finding it hard to attract fresh blood. But FP has a plan, and it revolves around his son, Jughead. Hunted by the most fearsome biker gangs in the state, an unwilling Jughead has to step up into the role of leader to guide the Serpents on a perilous journey. There will be adventure, there will be thrills, there will be chases, and there will be death in this special one-shot event featuring fan-favorite characters from the CW Riverdale series.

Archie is such an amazing world, franchise and character and in this go-round we don’t see anyone from the usual gang other than Jughead and I for one am totally okay with that. What the show has done for Jughead is utterly amazing to me and it really goes above and beyond what you might have once thought was possible for the guy. Now there is a depth and complexity to the boy from the wrong side of the tracks that is not only welcome but long, long overdue. Sure he and Hotdog are great when it comes to things like eating and being comic relief but his wanting to be a writer and one that draws from personal experience like he does well it’s pretty inspiring.

I am a fan of the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. How this story gets off the ground, how FP understands his son and the overall concept of the story is really super solid. The character development that we see is fantastic and it takes the personalities from the show and utilises them to their fullest. The pacing is great and as it takes us through the story revealing the twists & turns along the way it’s great to see how it all feels so natural.

With how we see this being structured and the layers within the story emerging and running through suggesting there is more to come is beautifully done. Then how we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow is really marvellous. This really is a solid book and a great read.

The interiors here are pretty sharp. It has a great comic book style to it and the linework we see is strong, sure and through the varying weights we see some great detail work. That Jughead looks like Cole is great as it keeps in with the shows mythology plus it adds a real sense of realism to the book. Backgrounds are utilised fairly well, I would like to see more but hey what we get does a great job in binging depth perception a sense of scale and that overall sense of size and scope to the book. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a remarkable eye for storytelling. The colour work is beautifully rendered. How we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work really shows some incredible talent and skill.

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I am really rather impressed with this book. The level and quality of storytelling that we see makes me wish we’d get a set of limited series based on the characters and furthering the one-shot I just read. As they keep expanding the world Archie and it’s characters the more interesting and intriguing the characters seem to become.