This week, Archie Comics will launch a line of facsimile editions — classic comics, reprinted just as they were back in the day, right down to the ads and editorial backmatter…except with modern paper and modern pricing. DC, Marvel, and Image have all done versions of this in the past, and Archie — a company where reprints of classic stories tend to be a little harder to come by than Marvel and DC — has had fans wondering if they would get into the game for a long time. It’s a seemingly obvious business move, after all: they already own the material.
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The first Facsimile Edition is Betty and Me #16. At face value, that might seem like an odd choice, when you have so many first appearances and key issues to choose from. But then you look at the cover, and realize that there will likely be a bit of demand for it, since it’s been in wide circulation on the internet for years:
DeCarlo, the artist best known for creating Josie and the Pussycats and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, is one of the most influential cartoonists in Archie history. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, DeCarlo modernized the look of the company’s line, establishing new models for most of the major characters which would establish a new house style.
House style has always been more important to Archie than other publishers, and DeCarlo became one of the first artists to break with the policy, saying that he was tired of just copying artists like Bob Montana and Harry Lucey.
“I finally told them I quit, that I was tired of looking up and looking down [at reference material],” DeCarlo told The Washington Post. “I just told them I’d had it. And they said, Okay, you can draw it your way.”
The DeCarlo style is still, more or less, the style that is featured in “classic Archie” stories, with stylistic embellishments and updates provided by modern artists like Dan Parent.
Here’s how Archie describes the issue in their solicitation text:
It’s the cover that snuck past the Comics Code Authority and would go on to spawn a million memes! Archie Comics is proud to present this highly sought after issue of BETTY AND ME #16 faithfully reprinted in a full-facsimile edition!
(Facsimile edition comics are replicas of classic comics, featuring all of the contents of the original issue. This means not just the cover and the story pages is reproduced but also other material such as letter pages, editorial columns, and the original advertisements.These time capsules try to capture the feeling of the original comic as if you were reading it back in the day.)
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Dan DeCarlo
32 pages
