MONSTER MASHUPS #153

 I didn't pick up a lot of the early copies of the title LIFE WITH ARCHIE back in the day. So until I looked at a lot of issues online, I'd never noticed that for the first 50 issues, the title featured a lot of book-length melodramas, rather than the short teen-hijinks stories typical of other ARCHIE features. To be sure, the melodramas were still dominantly comical in nature, but LIFE often had the Riverdale teens getting mixed up in spy games, travels to exotic lands, and encounters with monsters.

LIFE WITH ARCHIE #39 is dated July 1939, so it's likely that the unidentified writer and artist were primarily swiping from THE MUNSTERS, which launched in September 1964. To be sure, though, only the emulations of Herman and Lily Munster are clearly patterned on MUNSTERS characters. 

Oddly, Archie meets "The Kreeps" thanks to encountering what seems to be a "normal girl," a la Marilyn Munster. However, the winsome brownette Wendy quickly reveals that she's a witch. Further, though Archie doesn't come on to her, she instantly falls for him and slips him a love mickey before inviting the teen to meet her aunt and uncle. Note the resemblance of Wendy's chant to a certain superhero magic word.

As the witch and her enchanted swain proceed to their destination, jealous Veronica stows away in Archie's car. She, not being muddled by magic, is duly shocked to see on the Kreeps' estate a big wolf, a tentacle belonging to an unseen horror, and a pair of disembodied hands named "Boris." 

Arriving at the main house, the teens first meet a creepy butler named Igor (of course), the shadow of a T-rex named Rex, and a caged, talking bat named Percy, though Wendy insists he's a canary. But Archie's comes out of his love-trance just in time to join Veronica in freaking out at the sight of Wendy's aunt and uncle. The two teens speed back to Riverdale, and don't get to see Wendy show that she, too, is a real monster. I think the reason she becomes a fish-woman is so that the writer could toss out an in-joke vaguely referencing Starkist Tuna's mascot Charlie (created in 1961). I doubt that this was the Archie Gang's first encounter with multiple monsters-- certainly it's not even a good story of its kind-- even if the only earlier item might be the cover of this 1961 magazine.