More Archie 75th Anniversary Sketches

Here are more of the unpublished Archie sketches intended for a special 75th Anniversary book celebrating the history of the Archie Comics company. The book ended up being cancelled and I talk about it and my involvement in a previous post which you can read about here:

http://fernandoruizeverybody.com/archie-75th-anniversary-sketches/

As I describe in my earlier post, these sketches were done as preliminary drawings that would serve as the first page to each chapter of the book. Each chapter was intended to look at each decade of the company’s history and each of these sketches was supposed to reflect it’s assigned decade. Some decades were easier than others. The 1970’s sketch was probably the easiest of all with the obvious choice of putting Archie in John Travolta’s iconic white disco suit from the film Saturday Night Fever. This idea was such a given I enjoyed that rare situation of only needing one single sketch. I handed it in and it was immediately accepted. Other decades weren’t as easy to define. The sixties were a snap. The eighties weren’t too tough. Once we got to the 90’s however, it became more difficult to summarize each decade in a single Archie figure. The 90’s were a challenge but the 2000’s and beyond were really rough! It’s difficult to come up with an interesting, cute visual for decades mostly epitomized by cell phones and computers.

Here we see one of my ideas for the 1950’s. Again, as I showed in my last post, I’m looking to Elvis for inspiration. For the 1990’s I went to Archie as a grungy skateboarder. For the 2000’s, I finally came up with an image of Archie cyber-chatting with Betty and Veronica. I think this was the only sketch in the entire series to involve any other character aside from Archie. I ended up liking this image more than I thought I would. I thought if I kept pushing it, it could be turned into a decent cover gag. I never pursued that idea though as I never heard anything on these sketches. Eventually, Victor Gorelick told me the book was cancelled. These sketches …and I drew A LOT of ’em… were for nothing. I guess we can all enjoy them here! Don’t let ’em go totally to waste. Comment about them below and SHARE!