Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica #288

The cover of this 1979 Archie Comics entry tells a cheerful, self-deprecating story in two panels: Betty and Veronica energetically wave their purple pompoms in their Riverdale uniforms, boasting that their routines made the other school look sick — while a portly, apron-wearing man looks on amused beside a scoreboard showing Riverdale vs. New Rochelle. The punchline lands in the lower panel, where a yawning Veronica flatly notes that the team still lost forty to nothing, leaving Betty equally deflated over her root beer. Dan DeCarlo and Jim DeCarlo's cover art captures that warm, gently comedic Riverdale spirit perfectly, making this a cheerful snapshot of small-town high school life at its most endearingly hapless.