ARCHIE - from Hideous Itchiness to Appealing Fun

ARCHIE is about as all-American and generic-but-cute a cartoon style as ever existed. But it didn't start out that way....

ITCHY LUMPY PIMPLY SWOLLEN BEGINNINGS

The first Archie comics were drawn by bad superhero artists. Guys who loved to fill up stiff awkward uncomposed drawings with itchy sloppy cross-hatching.Archie himself was a pile of itchy pimply lumps who just before puberty dreamed of his favorite men in colorful undergarments.
At the onset of puberty he was aghast that his dreams shifted to something altogether different than men in underpants.These artists must have been going through puberty too. Look at the attention to the cross-hatching on the girls' most sensitive swollen aching areas. You gotta see the insides of these comics to believe them!

Poor Archie had a hard time adjusting to this new stage in his life. Can you believe this stuff was on the newsstands in front of decent American kids of the 1940s?
This has to be one of the itchiest lumpiest drawing styles in history. It's amazing that the comics survived past this fetal stage of development. Maybe because they had all the characters and their relationships figured out right from the beginning -even though they were lumpy.

EARLY CUTE EYES, LESS ITCH

At some point in the late 40s the style smoothed out and got much cuter.

Archie's pubescent pimples and cross-hatchy complexion migrated to his temples and remained under control there forever.
The girls retained lumps only in the places we like them to be lumpy. They are cute in a puppet-like googly eyed way.

BOB MONTANA

Bob Montana may have been the one to redesign the more appealing, more cartoony streamlined version of Archie and the gang. He also drew the daily and Sunday comics for years. He has a very fun style and it's a little offbeat - not perfectly balanced.I'm not sure who did these two, because they aren't signed, but they definitely fall in line with the Montana look.
Archie's pimples eventually evolved into ringworm.

BILL ? - AND VARIOUS

I'm not sure who these are either, but they have the rounded features and huge saucer eyes that gave the characters so much appeal.

HARRY LUCEY

Harry Lucey is my favorite Archie artist because he has an awkward yet really human style. He isn't trying for perfect balance in his poses and design. Instead he goes for a more fleshy life-like quality. His girls are the most feminine because of their slight awkwardness and always have a veneer of filth in their poses and attitudes. This was a guaranteed formula for success - aiming stories and drawings about teenage sexual tension at teeny-boppers.

Lucey's girls stand and pose like real girls - slightly off-balance.

DAN DE CARLO

Dan De Carlo seems to be the favorite Archie artist among modern cartoonists. I think it's because his design aimed at being perfectly balanced and safe. It is appealing graphically, but to me it can be too careful, stiff and unnatural.
He avoids difficult poses and when he needs to bend the characters, just takes the same 3/4 head and torso he would draw on a straight on eye-level shot and tilts it on an angle like a flash cartoon. Very wooden.Here's a DeCarlo action pose - all limbs and body parts in straight lines bent in 90% angles.

He does have quite a talent for interesting outfits and designs.
It's strange that this stiff wooden simple style has since influenced super-hero cartoons, which by their inherent nature should be meaty, muscular and dynamic.

I like Archie during its heyday of the late 40s to the early 60s. It is a kind of generic style, but a very appealing one and it aims directly at true humanity. Today's generic is aiming at aliens from space. You have to learn to accept it and get used to it, whereas Archie appealed to universal urges. You don't have to be trained to read cute pictures of pretty girls constantly tempting and frustrating "America's Typical Teenager".

I'll put some stuff up from each artist soon.

I got these images from this great site that's full of old comic book covers:
http://www.coverbrowser.com/


If you know some of the artists here I couldn't identify, let me know!

Lumpy and Itchy Animation Designs

Lumpy Out Of Ignorance

In the 40s ,every studio tried to do the Disney/WB construction style of animation drawing. Not everyone understood it though. If you can't already draw well and you see a construction model from the 40s, you will assume that a cartoon character is made up of sausage like forms, but you won't see how they properly connect to each other - as in these models from Dave Hand's Animaland series. Dave Hand came from Disney - he directed Bambi and many other cute well drawn Disney cartoons and then went to England to supervise production on some imitation Disney cartoons.

http://www.dhprod.com/film1.html
These cartoons have a lot going for them - great background design and color, beautiful motion and timing, but a lot of the designs are these lumpy looking misunderstandings of the "Preston Blair" style.

These drawings are extremely awkward and therefore unappealing and amateurish looking. The lion's jaw and muzzle are formless shapes that don't attach to the cranium. The lip is confused with the chin (as in Tiny Toons and Animaniacs)It's amazing that such expensive fluid animation can have such sloppy drawings, but that was common in American cartoons at the time too at the B and C studios.
You could even find sloppy misunderstandings of constructed drawings in Disney cartoons here and there.

MGM made great cartoons with excellent design and drawing, yet they couldn't find cartoonists to do their posters who could draw a pear and a sphere that didn't look like it was melting all over the place.

I'm sure these toys are not supposed to be formless, but they are. By the 1970s formlessness in all walks of life became mainstream. Just 5 years earlier you could still find very appealing toys of Hanna Barbera characters or any other studios'. In the quickest decline in skill and culture probably in history you saw everything go to Hell within 5 years. Cartoons joined music, TV, movies and all other forms of popular culture in overnight decay. Pleasuring the senses disappeared from the face of the earth.
These blobs are just blobs and unappealing out of straight ignorance - just plain bad design by amateurs.

Itchy

As a kid I never liked scratchy looking non-cartoony drawings - especially when they were pretending to be "wacky". There were some Mad artists that were instantly appealing and cartoony -like Don Martin, Bob Clarke, Harvey Kurtzman and more and they were the first articles and comics I would "read" when I picked up the latest Mad Magazine.
Here's George Woodbridge who not only refused to draw appealing big-eyes, he refused to draw eyes at all!
The more realistic itchy artists like George Woodbridge, John Severin and Will Elder seemed to me to be throwbacks to cartoons from the 1800s that were meant to be funny by being uglier than actual life. The little unsure broken crosshatching crawling all over bland shapes with tiny eyes just baffled me as a kid. I guess this style inspired the underground artists of the 60s who took itchiness to whole new levels of unappealingness.

People always ask me if I'm influenced by underground comics and I'm astounded. It's the exact opposite of what I try to do.

To me cartoons are supposed to be skillful and fun to look at, not eye gouging torture.

Adding Itchiness to Lumps On Purpose

Here's a style made up out of the 2 things I hated most as a kid - lumpiness and itchiness.

I can't find any appeal in drawings like this. You can barely even tell what you are looking at except that it's probably made by really serious responsible people who think fun is bad for you. The odd thing is that as an artist, I can tell that some of these are actually good drawings on some technical level and much of the animation was done by actual cartoony artists from the 40s and 50s.

It really and honestly is "ugly on purpose". I can't imagine for a second that anyone working on this could have thought it would appeal to kids - not after they had been weaned on Bugs Bunny, Donald and Goofy, The Flintstones, Mighty Mouse and a slew of cartoons that were purposely designed to give instant pleasure to young eyes.

What the heck are we even looking at here?

This sequence is astounding. The artist can actually draw well, but purposely is abandoning classic Disney principles all over the place. Including just plain logical "readability"! Every pose has no silhouette-the arms are glued to the body with no space inbetween, every pose is perfectly "twinned". Whatever construction exists is buried under wobbly itchy lumps. It looks like she is covered in some medieval disease.

It's as if this stuff is designed just to be hard to do and to rebel against classic principles and just plain fun. But why? What strange goals for people who work so hard.

The same animators who once did simple fun character designs and entertained millions of people around the world are now working ten times as hard surely knowing that no one is going to enjoy it or even be able to tell what they are looking at.


Here, Corny Cole gets a bit of appeal into at least the eyes of the main characters...

But then is corrected by Richard Williams who knows appeal is selling out to the man.
http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=1179