by Moe Zilla

Created on: June 07, 2008   Last Updated: January 31, 2009

Archie is America's oldest teenager - and he's been a teenager for over 67 years. The cheery red-headed teenager has been trying to choose between Betty and Veronica since the 1940s, joking with his friend Jughead and avoiding his high school's principal, Mr. Weatherbee. But it turns out that familiar characters like Veronica and Ms. Grundy were based on real people the cartoonist remembered from the 1930s. They've now been introduced to four different generations of Americans through the comic strip's simple jokes, some of which actually date back to the vaudeville era in the 1920s.

In 1920, a showgirl from the Ziegfield Follies had a baby with a vaudeville banjo player just two years after the end of World War I. When he turned 7, Bob Montana decided to become a cartoonist, according to Wikipedia, and later he'd draw characters based on people he remembered from his high school in Massachusetts. It's been said that Montana drew on his family's vaudeville background when he started writing the first jokes for Archie, the perpetual teenager, he created in 1941.

Montana then spent the next four years in the army, stationed in their signal corps division in New Jersey. Only when the war ended did he return to drawing Archie - in a daily newspaper comic strip which he drew for the next 30 years. And it was only then that Archie reached a new level of popularity.

The 1960s began changing America, since the post-war "baby boom" had created the largest generation of teenagers in U.S. history - and the music industry was anxious to sell them records. Archie and his friends began appearing in a TV cartoon in 1968, where they cheerfully announced that they'd formed their own rock band. Their song "Sugar, Sugar" not only went straight to #1 on the top 40 charts - but it became the best-selling song of the entire year. Nearly all of the voices were provided by a music whiz kid named Ron Dante, and the songs were produced by a music industry heavy-hitter named Don Kirshner. Archie cartoons continued appearing through the 1970s, and there was even an attempt at a live-action variety show.

Now it's 67 years after his first appearance, and Archie is still around. I see him every week in a "digest" of comics tucked in with the magazines at the checkout at my local supermarket. In the 1970s publishers, realized that it's easy to sell these digests in "non-traditional" outlets (where they're the only comic available) - and that sales strategy has kept Archie around for another 40 years.

But he's still a teenager.

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