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Bob Montana

Bob Montana
Bobmontana.jpg
Born Robert William Montana
(1920-10-23)October 23, 1920
Died January 4, 1975(1975-01-04) (aged 54)
Meredith, New Hampshire
Nationality American
Area(s) Cartoonist, Artist

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

Born in , he was the son of former Ziegfeld Follies 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 48 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. When Montana was 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 World War II 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 an 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. The success of the character Archie Andrews in MLJ's Pep Comics (Dec. 1941) led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (Nov. 1942).


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