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I swear, at some point I’m just going to have to transition this blog into something that talks about comic book adaptations and nothing else. It’s honestly kind of startling the explosion in comic book adaptations we’ve gotten over the last 5 years, even beyond the confines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Case in point, today’s Cover Story will be looking at the top 10 covers featuring Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Most folks now probably know Sabrina from her ‘90s TV sitcom or the newly premiering Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina but she actually has a long and storied career in the pages of Archie Comics.
While rarely counted alongside the likes of DC, Marvel, and Image Archie Comics has absolutely dominated the non-superhero side of comic books since it set about imposing industry standards to kill its competition in that field (this is comic books people, there are no clean hands.) While Archie and the rest of the Riverdale gang are their flagship crew they’ve also enjoyed a smattering of other long-lived successes, with Sabrina being core among them so let’s take a look at her top 10 comic covers.
10.
So despite Sabrina being a major staple of Archie Comics for years most of these covers are going to be coming from her more recent series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Aside from seeming to be the prime inspiration for the Netflix show it also features a lot of her best cover work like this lovingly minimalist design. I’m an absolute sucker for covers that make great use of silhouettes and negative space and this cover has that in spades. I really like the way the scraping branches of the barren forest look almost like veins against the soft red backing color here.
Also, the way the bats blend seamlessly with the branches is a nice touch and a cool reflection of the scribbled hearts and pentagrams on the right-hand side. It’s honestly really impressive that you can get such a recognizable image out of a minimalist cover for Sabrina. If you asked me to describe this character from memory I’d have a hard time with it but in this case, the visual design of her hair and headband go together perfectly. I also like the slightly menacing addition of the red of her eyes, that’s a nice touch.
9.
So this is what Sabrina spent an inordinate amount of her time getting up to back in the day, playing host to the sporadic horror comics put out by Archie Comics. Interestingly, Archie Comics was actually instrumental in putting an end to the horror comic boom in the ‘50s through heavy self-censorship of the industry through the comics code, only to turn around and embrace the genre themselves in years to come.
This cover speaks to their weird blend of spooky horror aesthetics, with the segmented design a deliberately retro look inspired by ‘50s multi-story comics but featuring a brighter and more vibrant use of color and far less blood and guts. That top image of the four-armed beast on the spooky more is a great example of the kind of camp that informed their work in this era. Incidentally, again I’m impressed how much blonde hair + headband is easy shorthand for Sabrina as I instantly knew the young woman in the bottom right-hand corner was her despite being a disembodied head.
8.
Much more of a modern cover here, though the logo design on top absolutely speaks to the campy, spooky retro roots of this franchise. I especially like the little detail of making the numbering for the book a coffin and the ghost lettering on “SABRINA” is incredibly charming. As for the cover itself, like a lot of covers from the modern era of Sabrina, it feels informed heavily by the history of horror movie iconography and posters. In this case, the giant looming eyes have any number of origin points in the genre’s history though they remind me most of The Eyes of Laura Mars, which would fit the somewhat more Lynchian preclusions of this series.
I also really love the little detail of Sabrina’s giant eyes looking over the woman with skulls in place of her own eyes, that’s a nice parallel and the way the burnt yellow of the sky creates the hint of flesh color without going overboard balances the superimposition well. The color palette, on the whole, is very well composed, emphasizing a kind of older, almost archaic look with the heavy tans, whites, and creams. It looks like the colors of some ancient scroll- even the blue of Sabrina’s eyes has been dimmed. Also bonus points for that great “Spellman” tombstone in the front and center.
7.
I told you the modern series loves its horror movie designs. In case you don’t know, this particular cover is aping the visual style of the poster for the ‘70s Stephen King horror classic Carrie, about a psychic girl who goes on a rampage after getting a ludicrous amount of pig blood dumped on her at the prom. Hence the visual design here of the side-by-side panels featuring prom queen Sabrina and post-pig blood Sabrina. It’s a solid comparison point for horror iconography given how much Sabrina’s witch powers play on the same themes of female power that informed a lot of Carrie and I really appreciate how all out they went on making this cover look like an old VHS box.
It’s a tricky art making a cover look like something else and it can easily end up overpowering the design but the smattering of peeling paper aesthetics and the tiny credits on the bottom are a really nice addition. Going back up to the logo design again, I’m not sure it really NEEDS the addition of Sabrina casting a spell on us from a spooky circle on the far right side but it’s a fun element all the same, which I think sums up the overall spooky fun aesthetic of these covers nicely.
6.
Okay, so this is a bit less spooky-fun and a bit more spooky-terrifying but I’m still enjoying it. Actually, I think this cover does a fine job conveying the slightly more adult brand of storytelling that this series favored. This was part of the Archie Horror imprint, as the left-hand insignia proudly states, which was all about re-contextualizing the Archie properties into much harsher and more frightening/upsetting horror stories like Afterlife with Archie or Jug Head: The Hunger. So giving us a cover that features bloody handprints, a pentagram smeared on the wall, and this incredibly creepy floating dead-eyed Sabrina definitely speaks to that tonal shift.
It’s honestly kind of a bizarre image if you think about it like Sabrina seems to be floating pointlessly in an empty room where a thousand hands splattered all over the wall? It raises a lot of questions that there are no good answers too, or at least no answers that don’t lead to even more terrifying conclusions, which is the heart of doing horror well. I especially like that this cover keeps the broom in there, most of the time this kind of “blood and guts meets classic spooky iconography” set-up can seem try-hard but this is a really nice blending.
5.
Fun fact, that “3.99” sticker isn’t because this is a scan that’s actually drawn onto the cover, it’s another one of those gags about making the design look like something else. The big reason it’s there is to cover up the 35 cents price mark in that big gray blocker on the left-hand side, which is based on an old convention used by Archie Comics. I’m actually not a huge fan of the colored barrier but I think it works here as the slate gray adds a nice counterbalance to the scroll color design of the central cover. The use of obvious brush strokes in the background, though, is what really sells this cover. There’s something incredibly handcrafted about that design that gives it a curiously evocative vibe and that’s not even touching on the central image of Skullbrina.
The skull is a really useful visual marker for conveying a transitional zone between old school camp spookiness and modern-day creepy gore and this cover is a great example of how. We all know that skulls are a signifier of Halloween and spook house fun but rendering it in a hyper-realistic way here makes it a lot less inviting, especially the way the fractures on the crown blend into the strands of Sabrina’s hair. Also, you can see here how the blue and red of Sabrina’s face can be pumped up to give a real splash of color to the more neutral tones.
4.
This is such a pure summation of “Gothic” imagery I absolutely had to include it on this list. There’s an entire subgenre of cover art that’s encapsulated in this image, everything about it an iconic style while also making it unique to Sabrina. Simply structured, this is a three-part Gothic image that uses scale to differentiate its images and create a visual flow from the upper left to the bottom right as the images get closer to the viewer. Those images are the looming figure of Sabrina’s father, steely and cold looking over the scene and defining the background of the scene.
He’s the most ambiguous part of this image, the monument of his face implying a sullenness that’s difficult to interpret. Next comes the old dark house/castle, a standard of the Gothic image textbook and a solid definition of the foreground. I especially like the way the house doesn’t have any clear front or place you’re supposed to interpret as an entrance, also the sickly sallow of the yellow glow from the windows is a great touch. Finally, you have Sabrina running from this scene at the focus point, telling us this is a scene that should be feared even if we don’t know why. It’s a classic cover design but classic for a very good reason, it just works.
3.
Hey, it’s another retro throwback cover, this time borrowing from that retro ‘50s horror comic aesthetic that informed stuff like Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. The big tell is that use of the red backing barrier behind the logo- that is classic horror comic cover design that lasted all the way into the 1970s. I do like too that they’ve even adopted a more horror comic kind of illustration approach, eschewing the painted brush strokes and tight close-ups of previous covers for this almost joke cover.
Seriously, this particular image of someone reading about the horror story that’s about to befall them is a major staple of pulp horror used in everything from the old EC and DC horror comics to Goosebumps. Also note the three horror movie posters in the background for Rosemary’s Baby, Black Sunday, and Earth vs. The Spider, which is actually a pretty unique smattering, though the ‘60s grounding actually fits Sabrina aesthetic a lot better than ‘50s B-movies or ‘80s slashers.
2.
And now for something completely different. Seriously, I have no idea how this incredibly colorful and endearing cover ended up produced by Archie Comics after all those super dark and horror-infused ones but I absolutely adore it. I admit, a lot of that comes from growing up with the Sabrina, The Teenage Witch sitcom as well as Kiki’s Delivery Service, which I’m assuming this cover is at least somewhat paying homage to. I really love the balance of colors here on Sabrina’s costume, keeping her colors dark and muted and her design vaguely spooky (horizontal stripes are always spooky) without clashing against the blue/green gradient of the sky, it’s subtle but it’s sharp.
What’s more, the visual design of the clouds is really well done, creating a very persuasive look with the hints of more pastel color and translucence, they do a great job framing Sabrina. Even the title logo fits this reworking, with the big bold title in a deep purple like Sabrina’s jacket but the softer magenta of the subtitle giving it that lighter tone. Also, this is the only cover to feature Salem, Sabrina’s wisecracking cat sidekick who I love.
1.
As I said at the start, I absolutely adore covers that heavily use minimalism and negative space and there is something just incredibly evocative about this particular one. That blood red sky is an absolutely superb visual background and gives the entire scene a sense of gloom and impending devastation. A lot of that has to do with the fact this scene isn’t outwardly creepy but it has the implication of bad things to come, a real sense of “the coming storm” in cover format. This whole series has made excellent use of barren trees and here they create both a great visual dynamic to help fill the screen and add a sense of movement from left to right with the blowing wind.
I also like the little detail of the car and parking meters here; it gives the visual a weirdly abandoned look to it. Even the small splashes of white and yellow on Sabrina herself can’t take away from the aura of dread this cover evokes. It’s steeped in visual tradition of horror iconography so old it’s become part of our shared lexicon, to the point that just the handful of implications like the rising wind and the blood red sky all swirling around this lone girl that we KNOW is more powerful than she appears is enough to convey a sense of creeping horror yet to be realized.
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