Archie Firsts

This is a handsome hardback, with good reproduction, containing reprints of early Archie stories; a precursor to an already announced series of Archive volumes collecting Archie strips chronologically. The back cover suggests that this volume has the first appearances of Archie and his closest pals (or “Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie” according to the inside dust jacket). Apart from the first appearances of Archie and Reggie, in Pep 22 and Jackpot Comics 5 respectively, what it actually is, is a reprint of Archie 1, Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica 1, Archie’s Pal Jughead 1 and Archie’s Rival Reggie 1.

Though there’s a revised version of Veronica’s first appearance in Archie 1, her first appearance was actually Pep 26. Betty and Veronica in a strip together also appeared first as backups in the Archie title.

This might not matter so much, if there were an introduction to explain the choice of strips or an article putting them in context. There’s a table of contents giving issue number and year of publication, but no writer or artist credits except that the back cover tells us the stories are “by comics legends including Bob Montana, Vic Bloom and George Frese”. Some stories are signed (Archie by Montana, Betty and Veronica, Reggie by Frese), but nothing to indicate whether they’re also the writers (the first Archie story is credited to Montana and Bloom).

John Goldwater is credited on the inside back dust jacket as creator of “Archie and his friends”, while “the likenesses of the original Archie characters were created by Bob Montana”. I certainly trust that this is going to be touched on in the Archive series proper, as Goldwater is not credited on the actual story and editor Harry Shorten is not mentioned at all.