Sabrina's Cat Salem Gets His Own Comic for Halloween

By Russ Burlingame

The Chilling Adventures of Salem will give the titular cat, the familiar to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a chance to shine in his own one-shot this fall. The book, which takes place within the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina alternate reality, will hit the stands on October 12 as part of Archie's month-long celebration of Halloween, "Month of Mayhem." Other titles releasing as part of the promotion will include Weirder Mysteries #1, Fear the Funhouse #1, and The Return of Chilling Adventures in Sorcery #1. That last one-shot is a direct sequel to last year's Halloween hit featuring Madam Satan, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina baddie.

It isn't clear whether this version of Salem will talk, as he did in the fan-favorite Sabrina sitcom from the '90s, or whether this will be a mostly art-driven issue. Either way could work, as it's to be written by Cullen Bunn and drawn by Dan Schoening, both of whom know their way around a spooky story.

The cover, from Schoening, is delightfully evocative of a 1980s Pet Sematary paperback, which likely gives you some idea for the tone they're going for within. There's also sure to be a "Salem's Lot" joke in that somewhere, but we're too tired to find it.

You can see the official synopsis and some preview art for The Chilling Adventures of Salem below. 

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Archie Comics' beloved teenage witch Sabrina Spellman is no stranger to Archie Horror, having headlined her own comic, CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, that spawned a Netflix streaming series. Like any good witch, Sabrina has a magical feline familiar named Salem, and now, horror-loving cat fanciers will have something to celebrate on October 12 when he stars in his first solo title, CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SALEM! Written by comics horror master Cullen Bunn (Harrow County) with evocative nostalgic "horror paperback" art by Dan Schoening (Ghostbusters), the one-shot follows Salem as he helps neighborhood animals exact revenge on those who've caused them harm.

The other "Month of Mayhem" books (besides the Madam Satan issue) involve the Riverdale gang directly, with Weirder Mysteries bringing Frank Tieri back into the world of his Archie Horror hit Jughead: The Hunger to tell a story of an alien encounter. The title is a riff on Archie's Weird Mysteries, a 1999-2000 animated series that saw a lab experiment gone wrong transform Riverdale into a magnet for supernatural shenanigans that put the Archie gang in competition with the Scooby gang for weirdest mysteries.

Lastly, there's Fear the Funhouse, a story aimed squarely at younger readers. Per Archie, the title is "Inspired by genuinely scary children's horror like Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark?," and the one-shot anthology features a framing sequence in which younger versions of the core Archie Comics cast tell each other increasingly terrifying stories by a campfire.

You can get in touch with your comic shop to reserve any of these for October, or wait and get a digital copy then.

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