Sabrina the Teenage Witch #48

History

The series in which #48 appears began life in January 2000 as a retooled title simply called Sabrina, built around the 2000 animated series and running for 37 issues before transitioning back to the Sabrina the Teenage Witch masthead with issue #38 in late 2002, at which point it resumed a conventional high-school setting while retaining elements absorbed from the 1996–2003 live-action sitcom. Issue #48 therefore falls squarely inside the editorially hybrid phase that ran from that 2002 retitling through issue #57 in 2004, when Tania del Rio's manga makeover transformed the book's creative direction entirely. Specific writer and penciler credits for issue #48 itself were not recoverable from publicly indexed databases at time of research.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Issue #48 is part of the third ongoing Sabrina series published by Archie Comics (cover-dated 2003), which ran the restored Sabrina the Teenage Witch masthead from issue #38 through #104 (September 2009).
• The series resumed a conventional high-school setting with issue #38 (late 2002), and #48 sits within the traditional storytelling window of issues #38–#57 that preceded the manga makeover.
• All five catalog characters appear in this era of the series: Sabrina Spellman (half-witch protagonist), her aunts Hilda and Zelda Spellman, mortal boyfriend Harvey Kinkle, and Salem — the warlock-turned-cat whose sitcom-derived backstory (punishment by the Witches' Council for attempted world domination) was retained in this phase of the comics.
• The issue falls within the band of stories collected in the Archie trade paperback The Magic of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (ISBN 1879794756), which reprinted material from this era of the series (issues roughly #39–#48 and #52–53).
• Issues #38–#57 of this series are described by the Grand Comics Database as 'traditional Sabrina stories with some influence from the television series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996–2003),' distinguishing them from the manga-influenced issues #58–#104 that followed.
• The conventional phase of the series in which #48 appears ended with issue #57 (2004), when writer-artist Tania del Rio took over and introduced manga-style art and a long-running serialized dramatic storyline — making the pre-#58 issues the last of the classic Archie house-style Sabrina comics.
• Salem's characterization in this era reflects the 1996 sitcom retcon: originally a non-speaking ordinary cat in the 1960s–1970s comics, Salem was reimagined as a talking warlock-turned-cat, a version the 2003-era series maintained alongside the modernized portrayals of aunts Hilda and Zelda.
• Sabrina Spellman was originally created by writer George Gladir and artist Dan DeCarlo, first appearing in Archie's Madhouse #22 (October 1962) — the character's publishing lineage that #48 continues more than four decades after that debut.

Cast · 5 characters

Full credits

Key issues in Sabrina the Teenage Witch

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#65 1st appearance — Queen Seles

Variants (1)