Oct. 1962: Bell Bottoms, Book and Candle

    Archie Comics’ winsome witch Sabrina was an intriguingly ambiguous character when she first appeared, poised morally somewhere between Veronica Lodge and Hot Stuff the Little Devil. I think many readers might have assumed that Sabrina the Teenage Witch was inspired by the ratings success of the pert, genial Samantha Stephens in the TV sitcom Bewitched.  But they’d be wrong.

If anything, it was the other way around.

With a script by George Gladir and pencils by Dan DeCarlo, Sabrina first appeared in Archie’s Madhouse 22 (Oct. 1962), well before Elizabeth Montgomery’s ABC sitcom debuted on Sept. 17, 1964. A good case could be made that both Sabrina and Bewitched were inspired by Bell, Book and Candle, the John Van Druten play that ran from November 1950 to June 1951 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.

The play became a 1958 Hollywood romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, Elsa Lanchester and Kim Novak as the beautiful witch Gillian Holroyd, who casts her spell on costar James Stewart.

Gillian and Sabrina shared certain characteristics. Both have cats as familiars (Pyewacket in Gillian’s case, Salem in Sabrina’s) and both are subject to the rules of a hierarchy of witches. And while both can cause other people to fall in love, they will lose their powers if they themselves do so.

In her first appearance, Sabrina explains that she is bound by certain additional limitations cited in traditional lore — she can’t sink in water, and she can’t cry. She has an impish side, using her magic both for and against her high school basketball team, for example.

The idea of juxtaposing witches to a contemporary setting had also been explored in the 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch, based on Thorne Smith’s uncompleted novel The Passionate Witch.

The popular culture vogue for modern witchcraft was, of course, not unrelated to women’s increasing social and political independence.