Today, we look at a 1970s Sabrina the Teenage Witch story where the young heroine sought out Santa Claus and had a deep talk with him about faith once she found him.
In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!
Earlier this year, I talked about an outrageously out of this world tale from Archie Giant Series Magazine #196 in 1972 where Al Hartley and Joe Sinnott showed Sabrina the Teenage Witch using her powers to make Big Ethel fall in love with Jughead's DOG (who was anthropomorphized so that he could fall in love with Ethel, as well). What makes that super silly story really stand out, though, is when you see the FIRST story that Hartley and Sinnott did in that very same comic book, which is bizarre in a WHOLE other direction, as it involves Sabrina the Teenage Witch getting into a very serious debate about faith with Santa Claus. First, though, let me repeat some information about Al Hartley from that last article, to reiterate what a fascinating person he really was.
WHO WAS AL HARTLEY?
Comic book creators obviously come from all sorts of backgrounds, but as far as I can tell, Al Hartley is the only one whose father was a famous United States Congressman. Fred A. Hartley was a New Jersey Republican who was famous for the Taft-Hartley Act, an act that the Republicans pushed through Congress as soon as they finally regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1930s. The Taft-Hartley Act severely restricted the power of labor unions. President Harry S Truman vetoed it, but the act actually had a lot of Democratic support, so the veto was overruled and the act remains in effect to this day (although both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton nominally supported repealing some of the restrictions on certain kinds of union strikes). All of this was going on when Hartley was starting his career in comics.
Hartley did a few humor jobs for different companies but his career really took off when he started working for what was then called Timely Comics in the late 1940s. Hartley was not just a talented artist, but he was a fine writer, and so he was one of the first artists at Timely who started to work in the "Marvel Method" fashion, with Stan Lee just doing dialogue on Hartley's humor series for Timely/Atlas. The king of humor comics at Timely/Atlas at the time was Dan DeCarlo, and with Hartley now there, Timely/Atlas had some of THE best humor comics on the market. DeCarlo handled Millie the Model while Hartley did Patsy Walker's comics.
Briefly, Hartley gave superhero comics a shot with a Thor story in an early Journey Into Mystery, but he was better suited to humor (he did draw western comics and war comics for Atlas, as well, but humor was his forte). Like DeCarlo, Hartley was one of the most acclaimed "good girl" artists of the era. As a side gig, Hartley was one of the artists who drew the R-Rated Pussycat strip for Atlas/Marvel Publisher's Martin Goodman's men's magazine line.
Towards the end of the 1960s, however, Hartley became a Born Again Christian and around that same time, he moved to Archie Comics, where his old colleague Dan DeCarlo had gone earlier in the decade (by the end of the 1960s, Marvel was mostly getting out of the humor comic business since their superhero comics were booming so much). Hartley became one of Archie Comics' most accomplished writer/artists and because he was so admired by longtime Archie Editor-in-Chief, John Goldwater (the J from the original MLJ that Archie was named before it changes its name to Archie Comics), Goldwater allowed Hartley to license the Archie characters for a series of Christian-themed comics. However, even outside his outright Christian comics, Hartley often worked his faith into his nominally non-religious Archie stories, like the Sabrina story we're discussing today.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH TRACKED DOWN SANTA CLAUS?
The story opens up with an intriguing first half where Sabrina the Teenage Witch decides that she wants to see the real Santa Claus and she heads off to find him, but she is frustrated as everyone makes a pretty convincing argument that he doesn't actually exist. This leads to Sabrina trying a dangerous spell that basically takes her to the world where the things that don't exist but ARE there live...
When she meets Santa Claus, he explains that she's the first person to actually SEE him because Christmas is based on faith and that's why no one actually sees Santa Claus, because if we saw him, then that wouldn't require any faith to believe in him, he'd just be, you know, THERE for everyone to see!
However, Santa Claus is super maudlin. He explains to Sabrina that people just don't have faith any more and because of that, he wonders if he is just finished. All of his workers have already quit. Sabrina, though, thinks of a way out of their predicament by animating Santa's other toys to help them complete more toys...
Sabrina has convince Santa Claus to keep going, but he does ask her a serious question about whether enough other people will do their part in the process for it to all be worth it...
Sabrina explains that the spiritual world like the real world. Sometimes the spiritual wave is ebbing, but other times it will flow and Santa thinks that things are going to get much better soon...
It's fascinating that Hartley was routinely allowed to use his space to literally just discuss his religious faith, but at the same time, he was such a talented comic book artist and storyteller that the comic still WORKS, it is just really, really weird.
If anyone has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You're Strange, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com