It’s easy to get jaded after reading hundreds of Archie stories. The same themes keep reoccuring over and over. Jugehead and Reggie duke it out in a battle of wits. A rival school or band try to take out the Archie gang only to have their plan backfire. Big Moose hits on Archie. After awhile you feel as if you’ve seen it all a couple dozen times apiece. That’s why the 21-page monster epic Dimension Thirteen threw me for a loop.
Sabrina The Teenage Witch uses her powers to save a kid from getting hit by a truck after which Blabby Brayson, who saw the whole thing, warns her to keep her witchery away from football practice. As if that weren’t bad enough, the child Sabrina saved is actually a robot decoy sent by her arch-enemy, the lithping Professor Pither who, in one of the only bits of continuity I have seen in an Archie story, references Li’l Archie’s former antagonist Doc Doom.
Professor Pither’s plan is to distract Sabrina by making the entire football team wary and hostile around around her while he attempts to steal the Dazzleton Diamond using his inframous Time Taxi. To exacerbate the situation, Pither uses his new “ditmenthion bender” to transport the team to Dimension Thirteen, leaving Sabrina to catch the blame for their disappearance. Distraught, Sabrina is contacted by head witch Della, who arrives on a “cloudicorn” and tells Sabrina that if she foils Pither’s plan and rescues the football team from a force field within a violent vortex in Dimension Thirteen she will be promoted to Teen Witch Second Class. And that’s just the set-up.
Will Sabrina rescue the Riverdale football squad from the Phantom Zone? How will her life change with having her secret revealed? And can Sabrina stop a torpedo without the use of her powers?
I don’t know, doesn’t sound too far off from my highschool days.