Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

This week I reviewed Sabrina The Teenage Witch: The Magic Within Vol. 1, the first digest-sized black-and-white collection of Tania del Rio's reinvention of Archie's witch as a manga style heroine, for Good Comics For Kids.

I liked it an awful lot, but by far my favorite story was the final one in the collection, "Model Behavior," in which Sabrina's one-time love interest, Japanese pretty-boy warlock Shinji, is discovered and becomes a model...right about the time that Josie and The Pussycats are coming to town.

If you ever wondered what Josie and The Pussycats might look like manga style and/or as drawn by Del Rio, this comic answers that question (see above). Alan, Alexander and Alexandra are all absent, denying readers a Salem and Sebastian meeting.

The title page shows the cats and Shinji chibi style, while the giant heads of Sabrina (right) and her best friend (and Shinji's girlfriend) Llandra look on:

And here's a montage from Shinji and the Pussycats' photo session:

Please note that while Josie is hanging on Shinji in the first image, it's just a shoot, and she has no romantic interest in Shinji. Melody, on the other hand, does, and even asks him out on a date, but he declines, much to the relief of Sabrina and Llandra, who were jealously spying on Shinji the whole time.

If you want to see Del Rio's version of The Pussycats in color, though, you'll have to look at the cover of Sabrina #67, from which the story is taken (but which doesn't actually appear in the collection):

Speaking of color, the other thing that I wrote for a place on the Internet that is not Every Day Is Like Wednesday? A short-ish piece on the new The Smurfs Anthology Vol. 1, Papercutz's bigger hardcover collection of Peyo's Smurfs material seemingly geared toward adults, for Robot 6.

It's a nicely designed package of some great comics, presented in a very eyeball-friendly format, but is noteworthy for keeping the Purple Smurfs purple instead of turning them back to black.

The Black Smurfs had as much to do with black people as the Black Lanterns in Blackest Night had to with black people, so keeping 'em kid-friendly purple in this volume seems an odd choice to me, but whatever; some Peyo always trumps no Peyo.