Archie Comics #22
Archie Comics #22 (September 1946) arrives at one of the most consequential inflection points in the publisher's history: the very year MLJ Magazines formally renamed itself Archie Comics Publications, a rebranding that acknowledged Archie Andrews had grown from a back-page backup feature into the undisputed face of an entire company. Issues from this era — with the full cast of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Weatherbee, and Grundy all in place — represent the Golden Age stabilization of the Riverdale formula that would define American humor comics for the next six decades. The issue also lands in the same calendar year Bob Montana returned from wartime military service and launched the long-running Archie newspaper strip, making 1946 a banner year of creative expansion for the franchise. As the final issue gathered in Dark Horse's Archie Archives Vol. 6, it closes out a hardcover collection of the series' earliest material and gives modern readers a clean endpoint for that archival chapter.
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By September 1946, the Archie series had been running continuously since its Winter 1942 debut, with John L. Goldwater as editor and Harry Shorten as managing editor — the editorial pairing recorded on the October 1946 Statement of Ownership. The issue was published under the newly minted Archie Comics Publications imprint, the corporate rename that took effect in 1946 after the title character had driven the company's circulation past one million copies per issue. Bob Montana, the principal artist who had defined the look of the Riverdale cast before his WWII service, had just returned to the fold that same year, simultaneously launching the Archie newspaper strip in February 1946, so the comic-book series and the strip were running in parallel for the first time with their original artistic hand at the helm. Specific writer and penciler credits for the individual stories within this issue have not been documented in publicly available databases.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover-dated September 1946; published by the newly renamed Archie Comics Publications (formerly MLJ Magazines, renamed that same year).
- 1946 is the year MLJ Magazines formally became Archie Comics Publications, driven by Archie's circulation surpassing one million copies per issue — making this issue a product of that transformative corporate moment.
- Archie Comics #22 is the final issue collected in Dark Horse Comics' hardcover Archie Archives Vol. 6, which gathers Archie Comics #19–22 alongside contemporaneous Pep Comics issues.
- The full core cast is present: Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Jughead Jones, principal Waldo Weatherbee, teacher Geraldine Grundy, and Archie's parents Fred and Mary Andrews — all firmly established members of the Riverdale ensemble by this point in the series.
- A Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisement appears in the issue — the famous mail-order fitness campaign was a recurring back-matter fixture in Archie-line comics of this era, making 'Charles Atlas' a character-index entry reflecting an ad rather than a fictional story character.
- John L. Goldwater (editor) and Harry Shorten (managing editor) oversaw the series at this time, per the October 1946 Statement of Ownership filed with the U.S. Post Office.
- Bob Montana — the original Archie artist, who created the visual template for the cast — had returned from WWII military service earlier in 1946 and simultaneously launched the Archie newspaper comic strip (February 4, 1946), running in parallel with the comic-book series for the first time.
- Individual story-level writer and penciler credits for this specific issue are listed as 'Credit Needed' in the Archie Comics Wiki and have not been publicly documented in major online databases.
Cast · 10 characters
Full credits
Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers
▸ Reveal full plot — may contain spoilers
Archie gives us some "Hollywood dirt straight from the MGM lion's mouth" about MGM's search for places to film, Gregory Peck's advertising campaign, Audrey Totter, Gary Cooper, William Powell, John Garfield, Dick Bare, Paul Henreid, and Ann Sheridan.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).