TREASURYCAST #53 - CHRISTMAS AND ARCHIE
It's that time of year again! Rob welcomes back fellow network all-star Chris Franklin to discuss the one-off holiday treasury CHRISTMAS AND ARCHIE!
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I really enjoyed this trip back to Riverdale guys. I got back into Archie several years ago when the Life With Archie: Married Life magazines began hitting the stores. There’s some really nice Norm Breyfogle art in those issues. The only time I was ever able to get Norm’s autograph was on an Archie collection.
If you ever do decide to dip back into Archie for an episode, let me know. I have presented on the characters several times over the years at academic conferences. They were designed as nostalgia even back in the 1940s & they are fun time capsules of American pop culture over the decades: issues on pet rocks and other fads are fun. The line has also gotten much more adventurous and even adult in recent years. I’d recommend the Betty & Veronica miniseries by Adam Hughes, the horror-themed Afterlife with Achie, & the Fiona Staples/Mark Waid reboot.
Trivia: Bob Hastings (Commissioner Gordon on BTAS) was Archie on radio from 1945-53.
Ah, yes. Treasury Cast never disappoints, and even finds a way to cover Archie. Needless to say, I never knew there was ever an Archie treasury-sized book, so this show was a nice revelation. And, naturally, I quite enjoyed the conversation.
It was particularly interesting to hear the stories about your experiences with Archie. I have to say, mine was a bit different: I got my start reading superhero comics at about the age of 6, and only started reading Archie some time at the end of third grade. For roughly the next year, I read Archies and funny animals (mainly Disney ducks) almost to the exclusion of everything else. But then, just before fifth grade, I returned to my first love, superheroes in a big way.
Anyway, while I was still into Archie books, I think the digests were my favorite; I had more of those than the floppies – you just couldn’t beat the price to page-count ratio on those.
More recently, I started reading Archie books again – earlier this year I plowed through a number of the digest reprint books published a few years ago when Archie comics were observing their 75th anniversary. Those were perfect light-hearted reading for this dismal year.
Anyway, on the topic of artists, I’m not an expert or anything, but looking over the samples in your gallery page, I’d say most of it was done by either Dan DeCarlo or Stan Goldberg, while I think the art in “Old Stand-By” and “When You Gotta Glow” was done by Harry Lucey. Lucey is probably one of my favorite Archie artists, who worked mainly from the ’50s through the early ’70s, and it seems like his was the house-style in the ’50s and ’60s before DeCarlo became more prominent.
And finally, on that age-old question related to Archie: I’m on Team Veronica. And I should also note that she wasn’t always portrayed as a spoiled (and sometimes mean) rich girl. I noticed in those digests I mentioned above that in a lot of earlier stories, she was often the nice one, while Betty was shown as something of schemer, always trying to get between Archie and Veronica.