Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Review (the comic that led to the series)

Reviewing Issues #1-#5 (Book 1)

I watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch quite a bit when I was, oh, about eight or nine. Certainly enough to feel nostalgic when I saw Melissa Joan Hart and Salem the Cat reunite in this Funny or Die sketch:

I remember some parts of the show vividly, like Sabrina starting college in season 5 (I was unthrilled by the new intro sequence), and the cartoon version of the show, Sabrina: The Animated Series, coming about in 1999.

Despite being a minor fan, I had no idea until recently what a long and varied history Sabrina had in comicbooks. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is either the sixth or seventh comic book version of the character. But you can’t really chart her comics development without reference to her television career — it’s all intertwined. She was introduced in the Archie comicbook, and her first self-titled comic series started around the same time as her animated debut in The Sabrina the Teenage Witch Show. Both the book and the show adopted the style and tone that had worked in the Archie comics and show.

25 years later, Melissa Joan Hart comes along as the live-action teenage-witch, and the comics made changes in deference to the popularity of that sit-com. The comic was later overhauled to match the new designs of the 1999 animated TV series, too.

Later still, a manga artist took over the series, resulting in yet another new look. Each colourful interpretation of Sabrina’s world of magical hijinks has been successful in its own right.

And now…

…we have something completely different:

“A teenage witch?” says the writer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. “That’s not a witch. THIS is a witch.” Chilling Adventures is an unholy reconstitution of the series’ parts.

Hack’s painting is unnerving and bloody and the orange wash over everything brings to mind a mix of eerie twilight and sepia photography that creates a real atmosphere. It’s a great choice, though it is very… orange.

Orange like rust, like vintage bloodstains. I’m not saying it doesn’t fit, and it is both striking and unsettling. There’s just… a lot of it.

I can’t fault the artwork much, though. I especially love this emblematic cover to issue 5, which seems to have already become something of an iconic catch-visual for the series:

This is a horror story, without a doubt. In the first three pages of the first issue, Sabrina’s mortal mother is lobotomised. In the second issue there is a gut-wrenching series of murders.

I wonder if there are any long-term fans, perhaps those that followed Sabrina through each of her earlier incarnations, who are angry about the change of tone, like DC comics fans were angry when Superman went edgy in Man of Steel, or Transformers fans who detest how Michael Bay’s movie reinterpreted the iconic designs of the robots…

Other than blood, the themes of the book are high school and teenage relationships. The setting in 1960s America. You could claim the book is riding on a wave of other kid-centred horror stories set in the previous century, like Stranger Things and IT.

The series starts before Sabrina is born, but quickly catches up. If I ever need to write 16 years of story into 27 pages of comic, I only hope I can channel a fraction of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s excellence shown in Sabrina #1. It is so effortlessly breezy, so organically efficient. Five or six interconnected vignettes that take place at different times in Sabrina’s life, each with their own plot points, each introducing new characters and ideas, but each also smartly moving along threads and themes that started on the first two pages. Including, of course, Sabrina’s upbringing, but also: the mystery of her father; the character of her Hilda and Zelda, her aunts; and the controversy of relationships between witches and mortals. All of this is going to be built on as the series continues.

Despite moving quickly and being packed with information, it feels evenly paced, with time to breathe. As far as set up goes, I can’t imagine it being done better.

The issue is also filled with immersive details. I love how this ticking of the clock is emphasizing the emptiness of the room (which is about to be filled with witches), while also counting down to something, asking “What is Edward waiting for?”:

Later, Diana is locked away and is singing to herself, and her speech bubbles appear behind the bars of her room:

God, I love that. Such as effective, meaningful little flourish.

One more. A few pages later and Sabrina is in her school years:

“You sound like Ringo.” Love this. How often “sense of sound” in comics is neglected, no more than the sneezes of onomatopoeia and an occasional regional accent. This is a little more subtle, Sabrina describing how she hears another character’s voice, also saying indirectly that she likes it or finds it unusual. She’s also saying something about her taste in music and her first impression of her cousin. All in four words.

Towards the end of this first issue, Sabrina (like her father before her) gets hot under the collar for a mortal. Of course, this would be Harvey Kinkle:

This leads Sabrina to cast a spell — a nicely weird witchy spell with mason jars and backwards writing and spit — to entice Harvey into liking her.

The spell sequence is cool, but as a plot point this spell marks a point of weakness in the story. I’ll go as far as to say it was an error: it caused me to have a much reduced emotional reaction to the later issues of the story compared to what could have been.

Let me explain: how you would expect this story to develop is for this spell to have unintended, even disastrous, consequences — which is exactly what Salem warns of while Sabrina is casting it. Trying to manipulate somebody else’s feelings sounds like a cautionary fable waiting to happen. Considering the tone of the book so far, we know it’s more likely to be a Grimms’ fable than an Aesop.

You anticipate a reckoning, waiting for the childish spell to drive drama in the story. What actually happens is that the spell works perfectly: Harvey falls in love with Sabrina, and the spell is never mentioned again.

The problem is that the emotional crutch of the book in the last third, the drama and the tragedy, rests on your engagement with Harvey and Sabrina’s relationship… but it’s difficult to get emotionally attached when the foundations of that relationship is something supernatural and suspicious. The story powers forward without developing the Sabrina and Harvey relationship enough. It’s pretty disharmonious when the panels seem to expect a reaction from you, but you’re still trying to figure out if you even care about these characters.

I have to applaud Aguirre-Sacasa’s writing of the kindly Hilda, the strict Zelda, the sarcastic Salem — you very quickly get a sense of their personalities, and enjoy them. But Sabrina? Sabrina is… just the main character? Every panel she is in is almost certainly the most beautiful panel on a page — you really get the sense that she was Hack’s favourite character to draw. But I’m not sure Aguirre-Sacasa wrote with enough confidence when it came to Sabrina.

I think even Ryan North wrote Sabrina with heaps more personality, and that was in the Jughead comic — and in that one, that Sabrina spends an entire issue with a polystyrene burger over her head.

Yes, that happened:

Unlike Sabrina and Jughead, Harvey and Sabrina only really get one substantial scene together, in the car in issue #3, and it really just demonstrates that they’re not entirely interesting characters. Harvey’s “a bit horny”, and Sabrina is… “there”

There is another exchange in #3 in which Sabrina’s cousin asks her what her future is with Harvey. “I don’t know, maybe possibly…”, then she is distracted when her cousin mentions a present he has for her. What an airhead.

Things mostly just happen around Sabrina while other characters, like Edward and Madam Satan, are driving the plot forward.

There probably could, or should, have been a whole additional issue of the comic devoted to laying believable, relatable, memorable foundations for Sabrina and Harvey’s relationship. Instead, the story immediately brushes this aside at the end of the first issue to introduce Madam Satan’s story in issue #2.

Madam Satan has a dark, bloody story; she’s vicious, she’s unpredictable, but she’s also driven by very human emotions: love, resentment, revenge. She doesn’t kill without discrimination — she only takes the life of a helpful truck driver her after hearing the lamentations of a ghost of somebody he had recently abused. Nonetheless, she’s certainly frighteningly quick to turn to bloody murder to solve her problems.

Later she orchestrates the death of another man whom she turns into her familiar, and this is another one of those nice details that Aguirre-Sacasa has loaded these books with: the familiar she makes is a crow, because, as she’s already mentioned, the crow reminds her of her favourite author, Edgar Allan Poe. It also doubles as a symbol for her anger: it was the memory of Sabrina’s father that initiated her murderous quest of revenge to begin with, and in that memory, Edward was reading a passage from Poe.

Anyway, they’ve built up this chilling, threatening atmosphere around this character. What do they do with it? Well, they kind of release the tension, because Madam Satan’s plan is pretty campy: she disguises herself as a teacher in Sabrina’s school.

I know they had to work in the high school setting somehow, but this page has the feeling of a Saturday morning cartoon to it. Which doesn’t quite fit the atmosphere of horror they’ve drenched us with so far.

After that, you don’t get the sense that Sabrina is really in danger, and you don’t really know what Madam Satan is trying to achieve either.

In interviews, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack note that this image of Madam Satan in Sabrina’s high school classroom was one of the earliest images they thought of. Then, I theorize, the book evolved into something much darker, much stranger. But instead of taking the campier stuff out, they just kept it anyway.

Hopefully, these examples convey how I feel about the book as a whole. It is technically very well written, very well illustrated; it is a very stylish, smart comic, even a little innovative… but doesn’t really become more than the sum of its parts.

Sabrina’s cautionary tale is about not taking the easy way out: not about how Sabrina conjures a boyfriend instead of working to bewitch him the mortal way, but about how Aguirre-Sacasa fails to work out Sabrina the character, relying on the style and premise of the book to carry it home.

The worst thing is, he just about gets away with it. On balance, I give The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina…

4/5

This book ends on a cliffhanger, and, hey, it’s a pretty intriguing one. I just hope they know where to take the story over the next five issues, or they’re not going to reach the potential I know this series has brewing and bubbling inside of it.