Little Archie
| Little Archie | |
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| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Archie Comics |
| Genre | Humor |
| Publication date | 1956 – 1983 |
| No. of issues | 180 |
Little Archie is a comic book published by Archie comics from 1956 to 1983, lasting 180 issues. Little Archie #1 is considered to be "scarce" by the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide (only 20-100 copies exist).
According to the introduction in The Best of Archie, the idea for Little Archie came about during a poker game. John Goldwater was playing cards with some of the other comic book publishers one night and they began to kid him about his Archie comics. They told him: "Here we publish all types of comic books and you make an empire just out of Archie. All your books are Archie this or Archie that or Big Archie or Little Archie..." Inspired, Goldwater added Little Archie in 1956. Bob Bolling wrote and drew the comic strip, which introduced new plots and characters to the Archie legend by concentrating on the adventures of the gang during their early elementary-school days. Dexter Taylor succeeded him on the series.
Little Archie featured Archie and his friends as elementary school-aged children. It is arguably the most successful of the alternate versions of Archie. The world of Little Archie is remarkably similar to that of his teenage counterpart. Most of the same characters are featured, albeit usually in younger versions. Miss Grundy and Mr. Weatherbee appear as a teacher and the principal at Riverdale Elementary School. Little Archie is always referred to and addressed as "Little Archie". Although stories featuring one of the other characters would be titled "Little Jughead", "Little Betty" and so on, the characters themselves were always addressed by their regular names. Keeping in mind its younger target audience, Little Archie stories tended to have more educational and moral content than standard Archie stories.
In the early 1990s, there was a radical redesign of the Little Archie universe. Renamed as "The New Little Archie", it featured the Little Archie characters with contemporary fashions, hairstyles, and sensibilities, and with a more modern-looking art style. One notable change was that Archie was now addressed merely as "Archie" and no longer "Little Archie". This relaunch was by and large unsuccessful, and the Little Archie universe soon went back to its old style.
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