At first blush, Patrick Horvath’s two new comic book series don’t seem to have much in common.
“Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring” is the second in his IDW series about Samantha Strong, a hardware store owner by day, a serial killer bear by night, murdering ducks and goats and other critters in an idyllic Vermont town.
“Archie In Hell” is exactly what it sounds like it is: Eighty-five years after Archie Andrews made his comic book debut, the eternally young Archie gets banished to Hell by evil forces who’ve infiltrated Riverdale in the new Oni Press series.
“I feel like there’s a wholesomeness to both,” Horvath says of the two projects. “I mean, I’m assuming they came to me [for “Archie In Hell”] because more abstractly it’s innocent stuff and the trauma that’s happening is innocent stuff.
“Like, the idea of ‘Beneath the Trees’ was like if Richard Scarry’s Busy Town had a serial killer in it,” he continued. “There was the idea of this very wholesome place that almost everybody couldn’t even conceive of something like this.
And then amongst them lives a serial killer, and that kind of hit with a giant cannonball, like a horrific thing that was just out in the open.”
That same wholesomeness is a trademark of Archie and Riverdale and the events that take place in the new series.
“It just so happens that Archie’s like the main target for this cult that thinks he would be the perfect sacrifice to bring over this elder god from another dimension,” Horvath says. “But still, it’s not gritty or anything, but they’re traumatized by this thing. He’s very much through the wringer.”
The first run of “Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees” arrived in 2024, inspired by a sketch Horvath made one morning over coffee.
“As a practice, I would just do a daily drawing in the morning with my coffee,” he said. “An hour of just drawing, and I’d finish the thing just as an exercise. Trying not to be precious about it, I would just do it.
“And one of these drawings was of an anthropomorphic bear just walking down a hill with a bloody axe on their shoulder,” Horvath continued. “It was like, ‘Oh, it’d be kind of funny if there was a serial killer in Richard Scarry’s Busy Town.”
The second series, “Rite of Spring,” picks up eight years later when a duck named Monica Brewer, whose brother disappeared in the original story, decides to get to the bottom of the murders.
“I made it eight years later because I wanted to give it time to become a single-minded, existential redefinition of who she was,” Horvath said. “Like, ‘I’m just trying to find my brother, and I’m doing it in a very bad way.’ It’s a very not healthy obsession that she has.”
Horvath, 46, had always known of “Archie” and all the many iterations of that comic book which celebrates its 85th anniversary this year. But he didn’t really know it deeply when Oni Press approached him about “Archie In Hell.”
“I was telling somebody earlier at the signing, my first experience with Archie was at the grocery store, on the rack by the checkout counter,” he says. “It was bubblegum, and it was like ‘Archie Digest.’ It would be in the dentist office. My grandparents knew Archie, like, everybody knew Archie. It was just everywhere.
“So it was kind of a wild thing to be asked to jump in and do a horror book,” Horvath said. The company had explored supernatural or scary themes before, he added.
“They’ve got ‘Afterlife with Archie’ and ‘The Chilling Tales of Sabrina,’ and they’re awesome. It was a fun opportunity to jump on and do something different with it, but also in the tradition of it.”
The first issue of “Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring” arrived this week. It’s nominated for an Eisner Award for best limited series, while the original 2024 series is nominated for best graphic album-reprint.
Horvath is currently working on a third series of “Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees.” [He took the name from a lyric in the song “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” which, in the right context, is a pretty ominous thing.]
“Archie In Hell” comes out in November. Horvath’s signed for 12 issues of the first series, after which who knows whether Archie will have made it back to Riverdale or not.