VINTAGE 1951 ARCHIE DAILY ARTWORK BOB MONTANA ICE SKATING SUPERB EXAMPLE

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VINTAGE 1951 ARCHIE DAILY ARTWORK BOB MONTANA ICE SKATING SUPERB EXAMPLE:
$222.50

Archie original artwork for a newspaperdaily comicstrip by Bob Montana McClure Syndicate (New York) published February 1, 1951 india ink on heavyweight art paper signed in the 4th panel8 x 24 inchesVery Fine Bob Montana

Robert William \"Bob\" Montana (October 23, 1920 — January 4, 1975) was an American comic strip artist who created the central characters published by Archie Comics and in the newspaper strip Archie.

Born in Stockton, California, he was the son of ex-Ziegfeld girl Roberta Pandolfini Montana and Ray Montana, a top banjo player on the Keith vaudeville circuit. Montana knew he wanted to be a cartoonist from the age of seven. By the age of nine, he had traveled to vaudeville houses in all 48 states. (Montana was raised before Hawaii and Alaska were admitted as the 49th and 50th states.) He received his childhood schooling backstage in theater dressing rooms, where he also learned about comedy and humor writing. He spent his school summers in Meredith, New Hampshire, where his father raised vegetables and operated a restaurant. Montana practiced his cartooning by drawing caricatures of the restaurant\'s customers. At the age of 13, his father died of a heart attack, and his mother remarried.

Montana\'s stepfather had managed a theatrical costume shop in Bradford, Massachusetts. In 1936, when Montana was 16 years old, the family moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts. For the next two years, he kept diaries of local events and news stories, illustrating the diary pages with his cartoons. The students and faculty of Haverhill High later inspired the leading characters in the Archie cast, as revealed in a 1970s Boston Globe article by film critic Gerald Peary.

Montana spent time in Boston, where his mother and stepfather ran a restaurant. On weekends he worked in Boston, drawing and painting Red Cross and WWII posters. In his senior year of high school, Montana moved to Manchester, New Hampshire. He attended Haverhill High School until 1939, and graduated from Manchester High School Central in 1940.

Moving to New York, he attended the Art Students League and the Phoenix Art Institute. While freelancing at True and Fox Comics, Montana created a adventure strip about four teenage boys and tried to sell it without success. Then he started working for MLJ comics where later he was asked to work up a high school style comic strip story. At the age of 21, he created Archie, drawn from his own high school experiences. Harry Shorten, the editor of MLJ. helped by teaching him how to write a good comic dialogue. The success of the character in MLJ\'s Pep Comics (December, 1941) led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (November, 1942).

Living at the apartment on 24th street in NYC with his mother and sister Ruth, Montana was soon drawing the Archie comic strip, doing both the daily and Sunday strip which over the next 35 years was running in over 750 newspapers.

During World War II, Montana spent four years in the Army Signal Corps, drawing coded maps and working on training films with William Saroyan and cartoonists Sam Cobean and Charles Addams. In 1944, he was stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he met a 19-year-old Army secretary, Helen (Peggy) Wherett, who was raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In 1946, the couple married and moved to Manhattan, then again to Meredith, New Hampshire in 1948, where they bought an old New England-style farmhouse. In New Hampshire, they raised four children, organic vegetables, assorted chickens, horses and sheep. The entire family sometimes lived for extended periods in England, Rome and Mexico.

From 1999 to 2003, his daughter, Lynn Montana, of Meredith, along with her sister, Paige Kuether, managed a website, Archie Prints, to market prints of their father\'s artwork. The site featured pages from the diary-sketchbook kept by Montana about life in Haverhill High during the late 1930s. The Bob Montana Papers are in the Special Collections at Syracuse University.

After hours at the drawing table, Montana relaxed by sailing his Friendship sloop, the White Eagle, on Lake Winnipesaukee, and taking cross country ski jaunts through the back country near his home. He died of a heart attack on January 4, 1975, while cross-country skiing in Meredith.

Source -

Archie Comics

Archie Comics is an American comic book publisher headquartered in the Village of Mamaroneck, Town of Mamaroneck, New York, known for its many series featuring the fictional teenagers Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones. The characters were created by publisher/editor John L. Goldwater, written by Vic Bloom and drawn by Bob Montana. They were based in part on people met by Goldwater \"in the Midwest\" during his travels throughout the United States while looking for jobs and places to stay.

Archie\'s first appearance in Pep Comics #22 on December 22, 1941, was drawn by Montana and written by Vic Bloom. With the creation of Archie, publisher Goldwater hoped to appeal to fans of the Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney. Archie Comics is also the title of the company\'s longest-running publication, the first issue appearing with a cover date of Winter 1942. Starting with issue #114, the title was shortened to simply Archie.

Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John L. Goldwater formed MLJ Magazines and started publishing in November 1939. The company name was derived from the initials of the partners\' first names.

Coyne served as MLJ\'s bookkeeper and CFO. Coyne and Silberkleit had been partners in Columbia Publishing, a pulp company that published its last pulp in the late 1950s. Silberkleit had a college degree from St. John’s University, was a licensed and registered pharmacist, and had a law degree from New York Law School. His efforts were focused on the business, printing, separating, distribution and financial ends of the company. John Goldwater served as editor-in-chief. Goldwater was one of the founders of the Comics Magazine Association of America, and served as its president for 25 years. The Comics Magazine Association of America is best known to comic fans for its Comics Code Authority. He was also a national commissioner of the Anti-Defamation League.

Their first comic was Blue Ribbon Comics, published November 1939; the first issue was half color, with the remaining pages in red and white tints. In December 1941, Top Notch Comics was introduced. In January 1940, Pep Comics debuted featuring the Shield, America\'s first patriotic comic book hero, by writer and managing editor Harry Shorten and artist Irv Novick. The Shield was the cover feature for Pep Comics until March 1944, when Archie became the dominant feature; the Shield continued in Pep Comics until January 1948. The Shield predates Joe Simon and Jack Kirby\'s Captain America by 15 months, and his sidekick Dusty, from Pep Comics #11, January 1941, predates Cap\'s sidekick Bucky by three months.

John Goldwater, inspired by the popular Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney, wanted to create a comic about a normal person to whom readers could relate. He created \"America\'s newest boy friend\", Archibald \"Chick\" Andrews. In Pep Comics #22, December 1941, writer Vic Bloom and artist Bob Montana published Archie Andrews\' first adventure, beginning with \"Chick\" showing off for his new neighbor, Betty Cooper.

As Archie’s popularity grew, MLJ Magazines changed its name to Archie Comic Publications. In the mid-1950s, the advent of television caused the pulp magazine industry to suffer as TV became a dominant form of entertainment. With slumping sales, Silberkleit and Coyne decided to discontinue Columbia Publications. Coyne stayed on at Archie Comics as CFO until he retired in the 1970s. Louis Silberkleit and John Goldwater shared the same office and ate lunch together for their entire business career.

Archie is set in the small town of Riverdale. While the state or even the general location of the town is unspecified, John L. Goldwater attended Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of The Bronx, New York City. In the early years of Archie, Riverdale was located in Massachusetts, with Mr. Lodge being a senator for that state, but this is no longer considered canon. Drawings of Riverdale High School appeared to follow the general design of the original high school, now City Hall, in Haverhill, Mass. \"The Thinker\" statue still sits outside the front entrance, just like it did in the comic strip. One newspaper that carries the Archie comic strip, the Haverhill edition of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, calls the strip \"Haverhill\'s Archie\". It was said that characters in the strip were based on people in Haverhill especially at the high school, which was attended by Bob Montana. Montana first sketched them on a napkin in 1941 while sitting at the Chocolate Shop on Merrimack Street in Haverhill. The shop is gone, but Archie fans know that it lives forever as the \"Choklit Shoppe\" on Riverdale\'s Main Street.

The New York Times postulated that \"the cartoonist Bob Montana inked the original likenesses of Archie and his pals and plopped them in an idyllic Midwestern community named Riverdale because Mr. Goldwater, a New Yorker, had fond memories of time spent in Hiawatha, Kan.\"

For the comics\' 60th anniversary in 2002, several geographical and historical hints to the location of Riverdale were printed in every digest issue. At the end of the year, it was revealed that the hints point to Riverdale being located in the \"Missouri area,\" but that officially Riverdale has no location. It is essentially located wherever the reader wants it to be. Indeed, the geography of Riverdale is far too inconsistent for it to be any one specific location (see below).

In 2011, a copy of Archie Comics #1, first published in 1942, was sold at sale for $167,300, a world record for a non-superhero comic book.

At various points, Archie Comics has experimented with publishing various superhero titles. Archie has also been a superhero in some comics,such as Pureheart. Beginning with Blue Ribbon Comics #1 (November 1939), and continuing throughout the 1940s with titles such as Zip Comics, Jackpot Comics, Hangman Comics, Shield-Wizard Comics and Pep Comics. Pep was, \"before Archie came along in issue #22... home to the first ever patriotic superhero, The Shield.\"

During \"Archie\'s Silver Age (late 1950s through the 1960s),\" the Shield led other characters in the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby title The Double Life of Private Strong, while Simon & Kirby soon added another title — The Adventures of the Fly — which in turn was later joined by The Jaguar.

\"By the mid-\'60s, the superheroes were back in full force\" with Mighty Comics Presents and The Mighty Crusaders, featuring \"all of Archie\'s superhero characters teaming up for epic adventures\" under the new imprint Mighty Comics (alternately known as Radio Comics). The Mighty Crusaders comprised The Fly, The Shield, Jaguar, Steel Sterling, Captain Flag, The Comet, Fly Girl, Firefly and The Fox.

In October 1973, Archie\'s new Red Circle Comics imprint debuted with Chilling Adventures in Sorcery #3 (formerly Chilling Adventures in Sorcery as told by Sabrina), later morphing into Red Circle Sorcery with issue #6, running for a further six issues, until issue #11 (February 1975). A small handful of other short-lived, non-Archie, titles were published by Red Circle Comics before — in 1978/79 — two digests were published collecting some of the Archie Superhero comics from the previous decade. These were Archie\'s Super Hero Special and Archie\'s Super Hero Comic Digest Magazine — the latter notable for printing a previously-unpublished revamp of the Black Hood by Gray Morrow and Neal Adams.

In the 1980s, Archie\'s superheros returned. Initially published by JC Comics in JCP Features #1, (December 1981), in March 1983, the first issue of Mighty Crusaders appeared, leading to a procession of new titles under the Red Circle Comics banner, soon to be re-branded (in February 1984) the Archie Adventure Series, before cancellation in September 1985.

Archie tried publishing superheroes again in the late 1980s with an imprint called Spectrum Comics, featuring a number of high-profile talents, including Steve Englehart, Jim Valentino, Marv Wolfman, Michael Bair, Kelley Jones, and Rob Liefeld. Planned Spectrum titles included The Fly, The Fox, Hangman, Jaguar, Mister Justice, and The Shield. Ultimately, Archie cancelled the entire Spectrum Comics before publishing a single issue.

Source - Wikipedia