Chilling Adventures Presents ...Camp Pickens #1 // Review
Summer camp has a natural connection with kiddie horror. If you know nothing else about the coming-of-age notion of sleepover camp in the wilderness, you know about spooky tales told around the campfire. The American tradition of scary stories and summer camp are fused with the irrepressible Americana of Archie comics in Chilling Adventures Presents ...Camp Pickens #1. The one-shot summer horror anthology features three stories. Writer Jordan Morris and artist Diana Camero tell a story of Jughead and a group of campers. Blake Howard writes a particularly dark story featuring Betty that’s drawn by Carola Borelli. Veronica gets her trip to camp courtesy of a story written by Tim Seeley with art by Mike Norton.
They say Camp Pickens is cursed. Jughead is concerned about any horror that might befall him and his fellow campers. He’s going to try to survive with an unlikely group of kids in a wraparound story. Betty is smart enough not to believe in some strange curse, but she’ll be damned if she’s going to sit around listening to a whole bunch of scary stories. Veronica wouldn’t normally be interested in going to camp, but being a counselor IS going to look good on a resume, so she’s going to have to weather any horror-based threats as well in her own little story.
Narratively, it’s a bit of a weird fusion. Archie has done horror on both the page and screen before. It’s not anything terribly new. The approach to the tone in Camp Pickens is a bit strange, though. Morris, Howard, and Seeley are all taking the traditionally lighthearted Archie tone and adding in bits of darkness that occasionally dip into pretty grizzly stuff. There are a couple of fairly dark deaths in the stories. They’re delivered to the page in a strange Archie meets Tales From the Crypt fusion. There’s something of a lighthearted laugh track to it all. There are also strains of foreboding music somewhere in the background of the anthology’s tone.
The visual feel of the book follows the tone and form of the scripts more or less perfectly. The art looks a bit like a cross between traditional Dan DeCarlo Archie art and something altogether darker. Death hits the page rather unexpectedly, even though...the reader knows it’s coming. It’s largely light Goosebumps-style horror, but as it is contrasted against the visuals of deeper horror, it’s a bit difficult to find a solid footing to it all visually.
Archie Comics has found a nice format for horror. There’s nothing brilliant in the book, but it IS an interesting pop experiment that finds a weirdly familiar voice and just sort of...goes with it. The overall feel of it may be a bit weird, but in the end, the tiny narrative nuggets have a way of sticking around in the back of the mind well after they’ve been read. Anything memorable in the comic book format is worth paying attention to. Archie Comics clearly knows what it’s doing.
