Johnathan Hardick | The Express-Times

It’s a very Scooby-Doo issue of “Archie Comics” No. 627 when the rock band Kiss comes to Archie’s home town of Riverdale to stop a group of monsters from turning everyone into mindless zombies.

“Archie Meets Kiss Part 1: Riverdale Rock City” was released Wednesday.

The Riverdale Monster Society decide to protect the town by having Sabrina the Teenage Witch cast a spell to ward off any monsters. It all goes wrong when Veronica interrupts the spell and causes a wormhole to open up, letting a group of monsters through.

Then Kiss shows up to stop them. Each member of Kiss has superpowers, but instead of using them to fight the monsters their plan is to defeat them with rock ‘n’ roll.

The monsters want to suck all the fun out of the town and make it lame and boring and also turn everyone into zombies.

This is a very strange, silly and entertaining comic.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from a crossover between Archie and Kiss, but writer Alex Segura wrote a really fun comic.

Segura keeps all the wholesomeness of Archie and the gang and adds a new level of campiness with a version of Kiss that’s very similar to how they were portrayed in the really terrible made-for-TV movie “Kiss meets the Phantom of the Park.”

But Segura’s story has a Saturday morning cartoon feeling to it that I really like.

Reinforcing that Saturday morning cartoon feel is the art from penciler Dan Parent and inker Rich Koslowski. Parent and Koslowski’s art has a more modern look that manages to still retain the iconic look of entire Archie cast.

“Archie meets Kiss” is a very bizarre comic that should not work but does in a very strange and charming way that is hard to describe. It’s really one of those books you have to read for yourself to understand its weirdness.