Archie vs. Minor Threats

Sabrina Spellman has a dilemma:  She wants to bring her beau Harvey to the Witches & Warlocks ball, but he’s just a regular human.  Fortunately there’s a magical loophole that allows a witch to bring one guest of her choosing in exchange for an artifact of ultimate power.  Sabrina gets a lead one, and it just so happens to be in Twilight City – the same city that Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, and their classmates are going to on a field trip.  It’s also the city whose criminal underworld is currently run by Frankie “Playtime” Follis and she’s currently on an anti-magic crusade.  So it’s definitely a bad time for any magic users – or their friends – to be in Twilight.

You’d think that the squeaky-clean kids of the “Archie” universe would not mix well at all with the foul-mouthed and bloody superhero shenanigans of the “Minor Threats” universe.  However, if Frank Castle and the Yautja’s encounters with Archie Andrews and his friends have taught us anything, it’s that these characters are a lot more flexible than you’d think.  Artist Scott Koblish makes good use of that as he nails the “Archie” house style quite well, while giving the “Minor Threats” universe the gritty and outlandish look it thrives on.  There was, of course, little question that the versatile Koblish was going to nail the art, but what about the writing from co-creators Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum, along with guest writer Timmy Heague?

Yes, they deliver too!  Given the uneven nature of past “Minor Threats” spinoff miniseries, as well as the main series so far, there was the feeling that this was either going to be really clever or a huge mistake.  It’s much more the former than the latter here as the writers really lean into the absurdity of this setup while also doing their best to say something about the characters, and fill in some gaps in Playtime’s history.  If anything, the story does wind up feeling a bit too crowded at the end as the character switcheroos and spiraling magical chaos threaten to collapse the  narrative in on itself.  That doesn’t happen and the end result is a delightfully oddball crossover whose main flaw is having too much ambition.