Before Bewitched, There Was The Girl From Bald Mountain.

Former DC Comic editor Richard Hughes went on to become a writer for the American Comics Group. In 1964, he wrote a comedic story for Issue #119 of their anthology series, Forbidden Worlds. This 13-page tale titled The Girl From Bald Mountain was drawn by Avengers artist Chic Stone, with Hughes going under the alias of Zev Zimmer. The story might seem like a prelude to the old Bewitched sitcom, but in fact came out a few months earlier as it's about a young witch falling in love with a normal guy. Bald Mountain is a regular hangout for monsters and other supernatural folks including Dracula and Frankenstein hanging out in the background. Here, a young witch named Amelia learns from some neighboring demons that she gets to fly off on a broom on Hallowe'en(which was the olde time term for Halloween)to go on her first haunting trip. After nearly getting run over by a passenger jet, Amelia heads to the middle of downtown in her witch outfit which no one minds since its Hallowe'en, even though she magically changes her clothes to a nice red dress. Amelia had to create the illusion of an old witch when she gets hit on by a wandering drunk, but she switches back to her pre-mod look as she falls for Fred Spooner, the hapless owner of a diner who Ameilia marvels with his knack for flipping pancakes. He hires Amelia as a waitress, but she keeps screwing up her orders as she grew up on a mountain with monsters, and also secretly uses her magic to shortcut her mistakes. Meanwhile, the presumably notorious gangster Roger Ryan escapes from prison and robs someplace that Fred was at who gets taken hostage. Amelia hears this over the radio and immediately flies off for the gang's hideout where she permanently turns one of the thugs into a dog. Weak after her grossly transmogrification of a bad guy to a canine, Amelia zips back to Bald Mountain for reinforcements and swarms the criminals' pad with flying demons. Most of the thugs get tossed into a pond by Amelia's monster mates as she drops in on Ryan and pimp smacks him into submission. Fred is apparently still ignorant about Amelia's being a witch and marries her. The finale fast forwards a few years where the two of them have a baby girl who inherited her mother's witchy talents. The looney lass from Bald Mountain might have been slightly inspired by Sabrina the Teenage Witch from Archie Comics who premiered two years earlier, but Amelia's farcical fable has elements of how the Famous Monsters trend of the Silver Age played a big part in one of the lighter tales from a fearmongering comic book.

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