Josie and the Pussycats (comics)

Josie and the Pussycats
Josie and the Pussycats 48 Page Giant #1 (1993). Cover art by Dan DeCarlo.
Publication information
Publisher	Archie Comics
Schedule	(vol. 1) Varied (vol. 2) Monthly
Format	Ongoing
Publication date	(vol. 1) February 1963 – October 1982; 1993 (vol. 2) September 2016 - present
Number of issues	(vol. 1): 106 (vol. 2): 3 (as of December 2016 cover date)
Creative team
Writer(s)	(vol. 1) Various (vol. 2) Marguerite Bennett and Cameron DeOrdio
Artist(s)	(vol. 1) Dan DeCarlo (vol. 2) Audrey Mok
Creator(s)	Dan DeCarlo

Josie and the Pussycats (initially published as She's Josie and Josie) is a teen-humor comic book about a fictional rock band, created by Dan DeCarlo and published by Archie Comics. It was published from 1963 until 1982; since then, a number of one-shot issues have appeared without regularity. A second series, set in the New Riverdale universe, launched in September 2016.

The series was adapted into a Saturday morning cartoon by Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1970 and a live-action motion picture by Universal Studios and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2001. Two albums were recorded under the name Josie and the Pussycats: one as the soundtrack for the cartoon series, the other as the soundtrack for the movie. The band also appears in the drama series Riverdale on The CW.

Cartoonist Dan DeCarlo, who had spent most of the 1950s drawing teen and career-girl humor comics such as Millie the Model for Atlas Comics, that decade's forerunner of Marvel Comics, began freelancing as well for Archie Comics. In 1960, he and Atlas editor-in-chief Stan Lee co-created the short-lived syndicated comic strip Willie Lumpkin, about a suburban mail carrier, for the Chicago, Illinois-based Publishers Syndicate. Casting about for more comic-strip work, DeCarlo created the characters of Josie and her friends at about the same time. The artist's wife, Josie DeCarlo, Josie's namesake, said in an interview quoted in a DeCarlo obituary, "We went on a Caribbean cruise, and I had a [cat] costume for the cruise, and that's the way it started."