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Continuing the
EISNER AWARD WINNING
Series for Best Archival
Comic Strip Collection
More than 800 sequential comic strips
from spring vacation in April 1963 to winter break in December 1965!
DAILY NEWSPAPER COMICS
THE SWINGIN SIXTIES
VOLUME TWO: 19631965
Every decade comes with its own unique set of challenges and triumphs,
and with popular culture touchstones that evoke feelings of comfortable
pleasure as they allowed audiences to seek temporary respite from the
stresses and strains of their lives. Archie was such a touchstone throughout
the 1960s, offering a quick smile and a calming visit with characters who
inhabited a setting that was consistently protected from turbulent times.
Kids no longer, comics readers from the 1960s still enjoy visiting with
Archie and introducing him to our children and grandchildren
from the Introduction by Bruce Canwell
THE
SWINGIN
SIXTIES
D A I L Y
NEWSPAPER
COMI CS
1963
1965
THE SWI NGI N SI XTI ES
B Y
BOB MONTANA
THE SWI NGI N SI XTI ES
COMPLE TE DAI LY NE WSPAPE R COMI CS
VOLUME TWO: 1 963-1 965
I DW PUBL I SHI NG
SAN DI E GO
ISBN 978-1-61377-972-9
First printing, May 2014
Published by:
IDW Publishing
a Division of Idea and Design Works, LLC
5080 Santa Fe Street San Diego, CA 92109
www.idwpublishing.com
Distributed by Diamond Book Distributors
1-410-560-7100
Ted Adams, Chief Executive Officer/Publisher
Greg Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer/President
Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist
Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief
Matthew Ruzicka, CPA/Chief Financial Officer
Alan Payne/VP of Sales
Dirk Wood/VP of Marketing
Lorelei Bunjes/VP of Digital Services
TM & 2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. The individual characters names and likenesses are the exclusive trademarks of
Archie Comic Publications, Inc. ARCHIE characters created by John L. Goldwater. The likenesses of the original Archie characters were created by
Bob Montana. All stories previously copyrighted by Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Introduction 2014 Bruce Canwell. With the exception of
artwork used for review purposes, none of the comic strips in this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Archie Comic Publications,
Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Printed in Korea.
ARCHIE
THE SWINGIN SIXTIES DAILIES
VOLUME 2: 19631965
STORIES AND ART BY
BOB MONTANA
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS
EDITED AND DESIGNED BY Dean Mullaney
ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND INTRODUCTION Bruce Canwell
ART DIRECTOR Lorraine Turner
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Greg Goldstein
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE Joseph Ketels and Jackson Glassey
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Randall Scott, Michigan State University
Comic Art Collection, for supplying the source
material used in the volume; to Jon Goldwater,
Mike Pellerito, and Victor Gorelick at Archie Comics.
New England kids who grew up in the 1960s knew that Archie Andrews
was one of us. We didnt know exactly where Riverdale was located, but we
were sure it was somewhere in the Rhode Island-to-Maine corridor.
How could it be otherwise? Each year by November, Riverdale was
typically swathed in snowthat proved these characters werent living in
Florida, Texas, or Hawaii. During the winter months Archie, Jughead, and
Reggie were skating on bodies of water the same way we skated on lakes
with names like Moosehead and Sebago; they were skiing the same way
we did at Cannon and Sugarloaf and Lost Valley. Come the warm-weather
months we recognized bikini-clad Veronica and Betty, because we had seen
(ogled might be a more appropriate word) the beach bunnies who decorated
the length and breadth of Lake Winnipesaukee.
Certainly New England has no monopoly on snowy winters and
scorching summers. There was nothing overt in the material that prevented
Archie and his pals and gals from being based in northern California or
Michigan or even the northwest Illinois suburbs so effectively brought to
life in the writings of Jean Shepherd, yet that vibe never seemed right. Had
Nathaniel Hawthorne been inspired to create a dry spinster with just a touch
of impishness in her soul, the alumni of Maines Bowdoin College might
have produced a character resembling Miss Grundy. And surely, we thought,
Mister Lodge was a Boston Brahmin who had made his pile and then fled the
city for the peace and quiet of small-town lifethough surely he modified
the definition of peace and quiet once Archie and his gang started hanging
around his mansion!
As the years passed, those in charge of shepherding the Archie brand
decided that Riverdale is not, in fact, located in New England, that instead it
occupies space in the great American heartland. Such a decision deftly made
Archie even more of a national icon than ever: his hometown became more
a state of mind and less a community tied to a specific region or geography.
Had we learned this at a younger age the comics-reading New England
kids with whom I grew up might have been disappointed; getting the news as
older, wiser readers, we were more accepting. By that time, after all, we knew
that Archies artistic father, Bob Montana, lived much of his life in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire, so we knew that no matter where
Archie was said to hail from, he had a New Englanders sensibilities, a
New Englanders heart.
Bob Montana saw to that.

The guiding light of the Archie newspaper strip may have called New
England home, but he was willing to at least temporarily relocate to other, more
hectic or exotic climes. As a young man in the 40s he served Stateside in the
Army, based in New York and New Jersey. Years later, successfully established
as a newspaper cartoonist, he and his family lived in Great Britain for eighteen
months, with a half-year in Mexico and ten months in Rome also stamped into
their passports. Bobs wanderings recalled those of other cartoonists such as
Jack King Aroo Kent (who with his second wife relocated to Mexico for
much of 1954) and George McManus, whose decades of wandering the world
provided abundant grist for the Bringing Up Father creative mill.
Still, Montana eventually settled in the little lakeside town of Meredith,
New Hampshire, where he had summered as a boy (his parents owned a farm
there and returned to it when the Vaudeville circuit closed for the season).
Montana and his wife Peggy bought a sizable farm of their own in Meredith,
where the artist produced the bulk of his Archie newspaper material. In a late-
1960s interview published in Cartoonist PROfiles, he described his working
methods at that time:
I have to be absolutely alone when I writeI do all the
writing of the daily and Sunday Archie strips, and I do it in
the morning from eight AM to noon. After noon I give up if
I havent got the writing done by that time. With luck I can
write six dailies in one of these morning periods and a Sunday
page in another morning.
A Time and Place for Everything by BRUCE Canwell
5
6
Following that, it usually takes me from one to two days
to pencil the six daily strips. I pencil the Sunday page, as a
rule, the same day that I write it.
Next, I ink the heads or anything particularly important
and then send the stuff down to my assistant in Manchester.
He inks the bodies, the backgrounds, et cetera, and delivers
the finished strips to King Features.
Montana was doing his work amidst a decade of change. During the
1960s America was being pulled in different directions socially, politically,
and in terms of popular entertainment. President Lyndon Baines Johnson
used his 1964 State of the Union address to declare war on poverty. Later
that same year he signed into law the Civil Rights Act, making equality
without regard to race, sex, or religion the official law of the land, though
resistance to the Act and the changes it created brought out the worst in
many. The southern states became a flashpoint, often centering on the
Alabama towns of Montgomery and Selma, where civil rights marches
organized by Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and other leaders
culminated in violent clashes with local constabulary. In the north, when
forced busing programs began to racially desegregate public schools,
protestors and agitators in cities from Boston to Chicago proved the south
had no monopoly on bigotry.
Meanwhile, half a world away, the Vietnam War escalated as President
Johnson, empowered by a legislative resolution passed in the wake of a naval
engagement known as The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, committed the United
States to what would become a long, costly, and ultimately futile military
involvement in the Indochinese region. By the dog days of 65 Johnson
committed over a hundred thousand troops to the conflict, which became
increasingly unpopular at home and ultimately brought down his presidency.
The music world circa 1964 saw the formation of The Who, the debut
of The Kinks, and the first American appearance of a certain mop-topped
foursome from Liverpool, with The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan
Show on February 9, 1964. Seventeen months later, in July of 1965, Bob
Dylan literally jolted the industry by forsaking his familiar acoustic sound
and going electric at the Newport Folk Festival; The Doors also formed
that year. Doing their best to ignore these radical new talents, the 1964-65
Grammy Awards continued to favor the tried and true, honoring safe acts
such as Henry Mancini; Barbra Streisand; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Roger Miller;
and Petula Clark. Yet in the mid-60s, fueled by the British invasion, rock
n roll proved it was here to stay as acts such as Iron Butterfly, Jefferson
Airplane, The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and Lou Reeds Velvet Underground
launched and helped shape the listening habits of a generation.
This was a time of race riots and growing college campus unrest,
of burning draft cards and a budding ecological awareness. Amidst such
turbulence many of the mass entertainments of the day sought to assure the
citizenry that the status remained quo, that there was no reason to worry.
Disneys Mary Poppins served as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine
go down. Many of televisions most popular shows (Beverly Hillbillies,
Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and Gomer Pyle,
U.S.M.C.), offered a decidedly placid rural view of everyday life. And the
newspapers offered their fair share of non-controversial comic strips.
Archie Andrews was closing in on his twenty-fifth anniversary by the
mid-1960s; he, his friends, and their hometown had been designed around the
idea of light-hearted teenaged fun. To send Betty and Veronica to Washington
to join a civil rights march or to have Jughead or Reggies draft numbers come
up would have been wrong-headed decisions, even as it would have been
disastrous for Al Capp to send Abner Yokum to the front lines during World
War II and in the process destroy the carefully-constructed humor/fantasy
environment he had spent the previous decade crafting in the panels of his
Lil Abner strip. Times may change, but creators have a greater obligation to
be true to the nature of their creations than they do to blow with the breeze,
chasing the latest trends and fads in the hope of reflecting the tenor of the times.
7
Although Bob Montana did not mirror the headlines of the day in his
1960s Archie work, in his private life he expanded his professional footprint
beyond comics and brought a touch of what some might have considered the
Bohemian to Meredith. He described his extracurricular pursuits in his
Cartoonist PROfiles interview:
During the time we lived in England, my wife and I got
started on collecting art and this led to our starting an art
gallery. We bought a building that used to house a gas station a
couple of years ago and fixed it upif you lift the rug in one of
the gallery rooms youll see how we covered up the old oil pit.
In addition to shows of various artists work we have art
classes and this year we have three teachers. Also, we started
a framing department and found that this aspect of the gallery
ran away with the whole operation
After we opened the gallery we discovered that there
were a lot of creative people around, and that something like
seven professional artists lived in town. Within a year two
more galleries opened up. These developments led us to the
idea of trying to build an art colony in Meredith [We] live
on a sixty-acre farm here, and we lead an easy-going type of
life around our house. So, gradually, weve formed the custom
of having various creative peoplesongwriters, musicians,
poets, artists, et ceteracome and stay with us for perhaps a
week or so at a time. Our place has sort of become the focal
point for get-togethers of these people.
These various creative people that stay with us from time
to time are contemporary, and being with them keeps me
up-to-date. Theyre all individuals and I listen to them.
Just as Montanas travels echoed those of other cartoonists, so did this
description of his role in Merediths fledgling art colony parallel the role
Cliff Sterrett, writer and artist of Polly and Her Pals, played years earlier
in a larger and more vibrant artists colony located some seventy-five miles
to the southeast, in the Maine seaside town of Ogunquit. Sterrett was his
groups toastmaster general, holding daily gatherings at his home and
mixing highballs with spritely conversation in an infectious combination
that lured painters, sculptors, and actors (when the Ogunquit Playhouse was
open for the season). The Ogunquit colony was far more successful than its
later counterpart in Meredith, but Sterrett had the benefit of meshing inside
a long-established environment, while Montana was seeking to build an art
colony from scratch. It speaks to the charm of Bob and his family that their
efforts brought a number of talented persons into their personal orbit.
While the 1960s were, in many ways, revolutionary, every decade comes
with its own unique set of challenges and triumphs, and with popular culture
touchstones that evoke feelings of comfortable pleasure as they allow
audiences to seek temporary respite from the stresses and strains of their
lives. The 1970s provided a touchstone that helped America laugh at its
deep-seated prejudices in the form of Norman Lears All in the Family
by the 1983 release of Return of the Jedi, the Star Wars franchise had
developed into a touchstone that would span generationsand in the 90s
Seinfeld achieved touchstone status with its snarky writing and slice-of-life
stories, ostensibly about nothing.
Archie was such a touchstone throughout the 1960s, offering a quick
smile and a calming visit with characters who inhabited a setting that was
consistently protected from turbulent times.
The editors and creators at Archie Comics have continued to keep their
characters current and in doing so have preserved them as a touchstone for
generations of readers throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st. Kids
no longer, comics readers from the 1960s still enjoy visiting with Archie
and introducing him to our children and grandchildreneven if part of us
still clings to the belief that Riverdale must be a New England town!
April 8-10, 1963
8
April 11-13, 1963 9
April 15-17, 1963
10
April 18-20, 1963 1
1
April 22-24, 1963
12