I bought this on calculated impulse. I’m always looking at the Archie digests when I’m at Barnes & Noble. I saw a new Sabrina story inside and decided to take a chance on it. It was $9 and a nice thick little tome that I read over a few days while getting some sun outside.
The new story was by Tania
Del Rio and drawn by Bill Galvan. Sabrina is adorably drawn, but the story is
part of a continuing story about a new rival, Amber Nightstone, and not very good. At five pages, it was going to be hard to
tell much of a story anyway. Tania has
done some great work with the character before with her own run on the regular Sabrina
comic.
More classic Sabrina stories comprise about the first
third of the book. Al Hartley and Stan Goldberg
are the featured artists. In one story,
Sabrina is placed on trial by the Witches Tribunal for not causing enough mischief in the Mortal world. Cousin Ambrose defends her. At one point, Sabrina is accused of
demonstrating for Women’s Rights. (This
is from the 70’s.) Ambrose parallels
this to their world, where women dominate.
As a witch says, “If you advocated for Male Lib, you’d cause turmoil and
confusion in the Witch world.” “Exactly,”
says Ambrose, “That’s what Sabrina is causing in the outside world.” That’s pretty prophetic and insightful for an
Archie comic.
There is a story featuring Sabrina going to high school in
the Other Realm, which was an interesting setting experiment. There’s nothing from the Melissa Joan Hart era or the follow up cartoon. There’s this Al Hartley story where Sabrina
seduces an evil warlock with love (pictured above). Who can blame his change of heart? (Wait’ll Harvey finds out.)
Great pin up. Not sure who the artist is. The rest of the volume features Betty and Veronica. The first story has Sabrina showing up to save the girls from a ghost to make for an easy transition. (Does the whole gang know about Sabrina’s powers now? It guess so, since it’s shown on the cover. By the way, that is a dayglow orange on the cover that really stands out.)
We have a rare appearance from Betty’s older sister, Polly, here. Wow, what a knockout!
There’s a Mr. Irresistible contest at Riverdale High. Betty and Veronica are not the judges, but
have a vested interest in the outcome.
Of course, you can guess who wins.
That got a chuckle out of me.
In another story, Archie and Jughead set up Big Ethel on a
date with a mannequin. It’s as cruel as
you’d think. There’s also an overly
creepy story with Jughead meeting someone like Cajun chef Justin Wilson from
the 90’s. Juggie gets way to chummy with
him. (I’m not providing scans of either
story. I can’t un-see them already as
is.)
One story I really enjoyed was Dan Parent’s Sleeping Betty. It’s an Archie take on a fairy tale, of which there are many such stories. In fact, I have a digest volume full of them. When I thought about it and went back and checked, I’d indeed read the story before. (I’ll review the ***Archie fairy tale*** book later.)
Not a lot of Halloween-related material in this
comic. In one story, drawn by Jeff Schultz, there’s a costume
Halloween party with a twist ending. In
the back, there are Little Betty and Veronica and Little Sabrina stories. At the end, there’s an excerpt from the new Archie Encyclopedia.
The Sabrina material I bought the comic for was really not that great. Unfortunately, that’s par for the course for Sabrina. The character is very likeable, but most of her older stories aren’t very good. About halfway through this, I was really regretting the purchase. I only really perked up over a couple of stories, including the fairy tale story, which I already owned in another comic. So, this isn’t recommended. I’m going to have to really question the next time I pick up another Archie digest for possible purchase.
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