The Complete Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 1962-1971 (Sabrina's Spellbook Book 1) Kindle & comiXology

512 pages of SABRINA The Teenage Witch comics in chronological order. Every appearance from 1962 through 1972 in this volume. All black and white pages on solid white print stock, not cheap newsprint. You'd be hard pressed to find a well read condition copy of any Sabrina comic from this era off ebay for the price of this book. Great and fun stories for all ages. For comic art fans, it's an amazing and fascinating ride through the various evolutionary art styles until the character's look was cemented by the end of the sixties by, of course, Dan DeCarlo. Yeah it would be great to have this same collection in color but at a size and price like this you are absolutely more likely to take along with you to the beach, on a commute, a flight or just out on the patio. Highest possible recommendation for any fan of quality comics. An unbeatable value. A trip to past eras. A great gift for any kid looking for comic book fun.Added my own photos to verify actual cover art since Amazon is currently featuring the wrong image. Also wanted to show contents pages to confirm just how many and which comic issues of Sabrina's appearances are collected in here.

I was so looking forward to this book. I admit I did not read the description but I never expected this lovely book to be in black and white! I am really disappointed. It takes away the whole fun and experience. Why would anyone print this book in black and white knowing how we all expect color for such a major book full of the best stories so far? I do hope if they do print a book 2 it will be in color. I don't know if I will ever get the feel or zeal to read this book.

It’s my own fault for not reading the description more closely, but the black and white interiors were a major disappointment. Yes, I know they clearly state it. But I’ve become accustomed to their collections being in color, so I made the mistake of assuming. I will not be reading this, the colorized art is so much a part of the experience to me. Guess I’ll give it away or something.

This book is great, and it arrived in great condition. It came new, and all the pages were fresh, clean, and not bent in any way. It is a rather large book in thickness, but it is not too difficult to hold. I have really enjoyed reading all of the old Sabrina comics, and I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys comics and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I also love how the comics are separated by the year they were first published.

Fun visit to the magical realm of Sabrina. The pages are all in black & white, however it doesn't distract on the artwork by Dan DeCarlo's. In fact it highlights his drawings even more. This is the first time these stories are collected in a large edition like this. Fun summer read.

I cannot wait until Volume 2 is released; Everything about this book is nicely organized, categorized, and keeps you turning the page! Every appearance of Sabrina between 1962-1972 is in this book; that's over 500 pages of goodies! I enjoyed the stories (some literally made me laugh out loud!) and watched Sabrina "grow"/"mold" in a decade. Every fan of Sabrina The Teenage Witch & Archie needs this awesome bundle of spellbinding comic!Come on Volume 2.... Come Through!!!!

A nice compilation of early Sabrina The Teenage Witch stories and cover appearances. The only drawback is the book is in Black and White. The stories are still entertaining but lack of color detracts a bit from your enjoyment. The stories from the late 60's have lots of counter culture visual references and magical visuals that lose something in black and white. Still if you are interested in Sabrina as a character or want her stories and appearances in a chronology this book is worth your time. The price also makes it a value. I will say my 11 year old grand daughter had no issues with the black and white as she dove into the volume.

I must admit that I was quite surprised by the archival history and stories of this book from the debut of its star character to the series at its beginning, although I would rather have a large edition in full color I can really enjoy - and I can hardly wait for the second volume to continue reading!

Sabrina, a banal but good-looking comic very much dominated by excellent ‘good girl art’ in its first two years, was initially blatantly a strip equally about sex as magic, although given the youthful market, Archie Comics would no doubt prefer to say ‘romance’ and ‘dating’. There’s certainly an overlap with those themes, given the high school setting, but when these strips were first published (the book usefully presents the strips in chronological order), the art and text in the first couple of years made it mostly about good old lust, albeit teenage lust. However, rather than being a sub-plot or sideline to other events, the strips from the early years here are mostly solely about girls chasing boys and little else, and the results, although painfully honest, are inevitably superficial and, in the early ’60s, occasionally cruel.As a character, Sabrina was determinedly shallow. She had no goals, she wasn’t trying to do anything or become anything, it was enough for her to have magical powers, even if they were a burden, and these were devoted solely to securing the attention of boys. In the first few episodes, no-one knows she’s a witch, but at some point, people suddenly do. I suspect the writers realised they had nowhere to go if Sabrina couldn’t date, and had to hide her powers, both of which were part of the original premise, swiftly dropped.Sabrina the Teenage Witch (also a pretty bad but popular TV show) never worked as well as Josie and the Pussycats in terms of being an aspirational role model for mainstream, everyday girls because she was stereotypically, as well as literally, witchy—she was scheming, selfish, and manipulative, while the boys are all naive, gormless dupes who don’t really know what’s going on. Possibly, then, the most accurate portrayal of teenage life in comics! It was a scrupulously clean strip (even when Sabrina is hanging out with a lad who can stretch any part of his anatomy like Plastic Man), yet oddly immoral; Sabrina isn’t exactly ‘evil’, but as a witch is not obliged to be ‘good’ either. She’s not exactly Samantha Stevens of Bewitched, and would chew up and spit out Harvey’s Wendy like bubble gum, but she’s fairly representative of a certain type of teenage girl. No crimefighting for her, or saving the universe, she’s purely self-indulgent, sly, shallow, and catty. She was a Tinder girl decades before they were a thing.The result was a rather vacuous product built around a character most boys or girls would not particularly like, but may have at some point been, or met. However, there is no heavy-handed moralising here. In the early ‘60s strips Sabrina is just mean, and sometimes the writers clearly don’t seem to know where to go with that. Imagine Endora from Bewitched as a teenager. It was difficult to see who this is for at first, a sort of adolescent boy’s comic visually, but with stories for girls.It’s also difficult to see who this reprint collection is for, as the pocket-size format does the art no favours for collectors (incidentally, it goes from 1962 to 1972, not ’65 as it currently says on the site), and if the current generation won’t even consider TV or films made in black and white, and they won’t, they certainly won’t accept comics in that format. And let’s face it, monochrome comics are just a waste of paper, we all want, and expect colour these days. Unfortunately, now the Sabrina collection has been ‘done’, that ship has probably sailed.From the mid-’60s on, the strip became overtly cartoonish, and was strictly for pre-pubescent kids, rather than the teens it portrayed. There was less dating, and Sabrina became ‘one of the gang’, and it is this sex-free juvenile fare that makes up the bulk of the book (curiously, the Archie titles became more safe, retro, and square as the rest of teen culture went in the other direction, becoming a sort of nostalgic safe haven for traditionalists). Much of the art, however, particularly in the first hundred pages or so, is stunning. There are a couple of duds in the art team, but generally, these guys really knew how to draw beautiful women. In terms of pure style, it’s worth picking up the book at a fair price just for the first 44 pages, which is where my image gallery comes from, exclusively the work of the brilliant Dan De Carlo (who, you won’t read in the book’s introduction, was fired from Archie after 43 years service and creating the Archie ‘look’, when he tried to get credit for creating Josie and the Pussycats, the lead character named after his wife and her fancy dress cat-suit creation). Art-wise, Sabrina in 1962 and 1963 remains the Gold Standard, stylishly superior to much dramatic fare… but as comics in general grow up, Sabrina regresses. Midway through 1967, the overt sexuality of the strip is dropped entirely as the strip found its true juvenile audience and went for innocuous slapstick.It’s just a shame the strip makes such crass distinctions between good-looking boys and girls and the drudges and dorks the artists occasionally throw in when they’re portraying undateables for cheap laughs. When the script scoffed at deliberately drawn ugly or inadequate kids it was unpleasant and inconsiderate, with no consolation or comeuppance—society’s losers in the looks stakes were there just to annoy or punish the cool kids, and get a cheap laugh. Granted, the ‘Aunt Sally’ characters are drawn so excessively hideous that few readers, even insecure ones, would identify with them, but it’s still discomfiting and unnecessary stuff. Underneath the wild scarecrow hair, frumpy clothes, and hillbilly teeth are fellow human beings.Despite the non-stop parade of pretty girls looking gorgeous, Sabrina, like the other Archie titles, is very much a newsstand/bookshop impulse buy rather than a direct sales comics fan product, and comes complete with a trigger warning for sensitive souls unable to cope with the values of a ‘different time’ (and a time, I suspect, not that much different from today; I don’t know how much these wishful thinkers are convinced society has changed in a world of perfect Instagram lives, trolling, and internet bullying). When the ghastly suicidal reboot of the Archie world has run its course, it will be interesting to see if there’s a place for the original happy-go-lucky format in the grim, joyless world of modern comics, or whether Riverdale will be even more of a fantasy world than it was in the 20th century. But a little empathy or sympathy for those without the magic power of good looks wouldn’t go amiss, and there are some thoughtless aspects of Sabrina that can be deservedly assigned to the bin without diving head first into the equally shallow waters of over-compensating social engineering.

Quite decent comic book with some great artwork and ok stories. Nice to see the stories in sequence with all the covers etc. A sort of 'Essentials' Archie comic series and hopefully this series will be extended to include many of the other Archie comics such as Jughead, Archie super heroes / horror etc No issue with the comics being in black and white if it keeps the costs down. The size is fine as well as it makes it for an easy lightweight book instead of the usual hefty Essential / Showcase booksFinally noticed there is now a volume 2 available !

a great original collection, clearly reprinted and fun to take a trip down memory lane. Small size book makes it easy to carry around or sit in the garden reading :)

My wife was a big fan of the tv show in the nineties. She doesn’t read comics but thought she might enjoy this. She did.

Was amazing to see how it all started sabin was so different back then arrived on time and book is now very treasured by a massive sabin fangirl ! So different to the new caos comics!