SYNOPSIS: Little Mandy is unpopular at school, useless at sports etc, until she is befriended by a teacher who introduces her to a different group of girls who make her welcome and show her a few conjuring tricks and so on. They then show her how to get even with the girls who snubbed her by staring into a lighted candle and asking "Bruth" to help her. Needless to say, the girls and the teacher are (yawn) witches, and young girl gets hopelessly drawn into their ceremonies and so on.

A baby is sacrificed and she’s forced to drink its blood (Yeah, right.) She seeks help in a local church, but of course, one of the witches is in the congregation and spots Mandy, the minister isn’t a lot of help because he doesn’t believe in the Bible and, well, you get the picture. Eventually she finds a nice woman who gets her off the hook and she lives happily ever after, (with the help of Jesus, of course).

However this is another Chick Comic which has been severely edited over time. This is the current version of the ending:

But this is what I downloaded a few years back (Sorry about the quality; it's scanned off a laser printout!):

In this version, despite pleadings from nice lady and her "real" preacher friend, little miss dumbshit insists on walking home by herself and is promptly murdered by the Satanists. But it’s OK because she’s now with Jesus etc.

And what a clever plot twist: the same night Mandy is murdered, the phony pastor ("Chuckwyn" if you can believe that!) dies as well, and God no doubt derives enormous satisfaction from sending HIM to the furnace!

Also, in the old version. Chick trots out a ridiculous Urban Myth "statistic" that every year in the US at least 40,000 people (including babies specially conceived for the purpose), are murdered in witchcraft ceremonies. (That’s about three times the entire reported homicide rate for all of North America!) There’s not a shred of evidence to support this claim. Alternatively, if the witches are so clever that they can do this that many times without anybody noticing, how come he knows about it. Anyway, that has quietly been excised form the current version!

ARTWORK: The artwork is no more than adequate, a trifle amateurish in places. Mandy looks a complete prat with that stupid ribbon or scarf or whatever it is wrapped around her hair. No wonder the other girls didn’t like her.

MEMORABLE POINTS: None – where it isn’t sick, this comic is just plain boring.

1. The girl gets no indication or warning that there’s anything wrong with joining this new group. If she’s supposed to make a moral choice here, she’s not really given much help from God or anybody else. If she doesn't happen to stumble on this particular Chick Comic, she's toast!

2. The baby sacrifice bit is just too sick for words - I’m not going to reproduce it here. Even though we only see a knife being raised above a lot of hooded backs, the whole concept is so far beyond the bounds of good taste that it’s just plain repulsive. It’s not entertaining in its stupidity, or in any black comedy sense, it’s just plain sick!

Actually it’s similar to some notorious anti-abortion pamphlets that some brain-damaged evangelists were caught handing out to young schoolgirls some years ago. Anybody who would have been old enough to possibly require an abortion would know that the pictures in them were ridiculous, but not young schoolgirls who would have had only a vague notion of what the subject was about. Some of them were badly disturbed by the images of babies supposedly chopped up like a side of lamb. (The Lord sure moves in Mysterious ways…)

Download The Poor Little Witch from Chick Publications