Riverdale #4

This One's Full of Heart, Surprisingly

I'm honestly surprised to say this, but I rather liked this one. Maybe the distance I've had from Riverdale and its tie-in media has made me less grumpy, or maybe the POV character being swapped made it easier to empathize, but despite using a plot I hated in one of the novels– I can't be bothered to check which one –this wasn't infuriating. There was a lot of exasperation, but in a very “oh you poor dear, don't do that, it's a bad idea” sort of way.

Told from Kevin's perspective, this issue covers his lamentation of being the only openly gay person in his small town home. He's had some really shady hookups before, but he wants something more than just sex and he's learned to respect the level of danger related to a teenage boy hooking up with random strangers– some actually adults, in fact. What he wants is a relationship, or a chance to feel less alone in the world.

When he tries online dating, it all goes downhill fast and his best friends Betty and Veronica try to help him find other gay men in a neighbouring town. The only catch: he's lying about his age. This infuriated me in the novel because there's absolutely nothing okay with how Veronica coerces someone to make a fake ID for the endeavour by accusing them of living in a “privileged heteronormative bubble,” but here we see it from Kevin's perspective. He's just along for the ride, desperate enough to trust his friend's judgment, and willing to try anything once.

But it doesn't go quite as planned, and the combination of Kevin's narration with the art portraying emotions really goes a long way to humanize and invoke empathy for an otherwise annoying plotline. I get his struggle. I know how it feels to just wonder if anyone like you exists in a small town... except in my case I'm one of the people firmly in the ‘not open' category offline. I kind of just wanted to reach through the comic and hug Kevin through most of this.

So, yeah. Colour me surprised that I didn't hate this rehashing of a storyline I loathed in the novelization. I liked it, and I thought it was rather well-told here.

I don't want to spoil how things went, but I thought the ending fit well until the very last page– which isn't so much bad as totally unexpected and weirdly incongruent with what I thought was the overall message.