A book on the history of these characters necessarily means it will also be a book on Archie Comics, their creators, their comics and their other characters (and, to a lesser degree, to the comics industry itself, given that the publisher has been around since the Golden Age). Which led to a question that hovered in the back of my mind the entire time I was reading the book: Why center the book on Betty and Veronica in particular, rather than the publisher's biggest star (and namesake), Archie Andrews himself...?
I suppose part of the answer is obvious. Female comic book characters are the "beat" that Hanley has established for himself through his past work (And were one making a list of the most prominent female comics characters, Betty and Veronica would almost definitely be the next to follow those Hanley has already covered).
Another part? Betty and Veronica are just a bit more interesting than the character of Archie Andrews (who has become increasingly dull and anodyne as the decades rolled on), or any of the other, often one-dimensional male characters in the franchise, like Jughead or Reggie.
Archie, as Hanely notes, wasn't that unique of a character when he debuted in 1941, teenage boys and their lives already being a source of fascination and popular entertainment, most prominently in the Andy Hardy film series (which started in 1937) and its imitators. These included other teen comedy comic strips, even one at MLJ, the Golden Age name of the publisher before it became Archie Comics.
Additionally, although the world of Riverdale seemed to revolve around Archie, what made up that world, exactly? Chiefly, it was Betty and Veronica, and I think the argument could be rather convincingly made that the reason for the longevity and success of what we now think of as Archie Comics can be attributed to those two characters, and their unique relationship to one another.
Certainly a great deal of credit belongs to the men—and they were all men—who created Archie, Betty, Veronica, their gang and the world of Riverdale. Hanley spends some time on untangling who did what in the first chapter of the book, "The Men Behind the Girls," but, despite certain claims and the "official" version, it seemed to actually be a team effort, with contributions from publisher and editor John L. Goldwater, editor Henry Shorten, writer Vic Bloom and artist-turned-writer/artist Bob Montana...with perhaps those last two deserving the most credit, at least in Hanley's account.
What they created together obviously had mass appeal and stood the test of time, surviving several collapses of the comics industry and proving incredible, maybe even endlessly adaptable to trends, take-offs, crossovers and mass-media adaptations. And, of course, their teen comedy outlasted all the others, to the point that when we think of that particular comics genre at all today, we think of Archie Comics.
But there was also something special about Betty and Veronica. While Hanley notes that the former was something of a familiar type in pop culture at the time, the boy-crazy bobbysoxer, as a wealthy socialite and debutante-to-be, Veronica was already something of an anachronism by the time she was introduced, adding something unique to the strip. Their rivalry over Archie—who, at the outset, was certainly no prize, being neither good-looking, nor particularly smart, funny, noble or gifted—led to a particularly potent formula that, once employed, seemed to power so much of the publisher's increasingly Archie-centric output.
Though the portrayals of the two girls would gradually change over the decades, making one seem more appealing to Archie (and/or readers) more so than the other in certain eras, their rivalry would endure, even after they eventually also became the best of friends. It was a unique relationship, and I found myself wondering if they were the first, or at least the earliest, most prominent, instance of what would eventually come to be known as "frenemies."
Oh, and they were also hot. That seems to have helped ensure they stick around in the strip, as well as to help the comics gain and maintain their popularity. That they were (almost) always portrayed as sexually attractive, even after the Montana-inspired, more realistic take gave way to the more cartoony, Dan DeCarlo style, may seem more than a little weird to say out loud in 2025, when the line between teenager and adult is so much more bright and solid than it was in the 1940s (Remember, young women married much, much earlier in the era).
But the middle-aged men who created and chronicled their adventures for the majority of their existence, being men, seemed to take special delight in drawing the girls, and even since their Golden Age beginnings, the artists would regularly put them in short, tight-fitting sports gear as often as possible and, as time went on, would put them in bathing suits as often as possible. (Their beauty wasn't strictly, exclusively for the male gaze, of course; they were also often drawn in glamours, highly fashionable wardrobes, particularly in the pre-digest years).
Hanley discusses this at some length in his chapter "The Clone Wars," where he notes the vast difference between the design of Archie's male characters and their female ones. The male characters, of course, look nothing alike, not in the lines they are drawn in, or the shapes of their figures; if you were shown silhouettes of Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Dilton or Moose, you would instantly know who was who. Not so with the girls, who have the exact same figures, the exact same faces, and are mainly distinguishable by the style and/or color of their hair (Pretty much no matter who was drawing them). This wasn't just the case with Betty and Veronica, but all the youngwomen of Riverdale, save for outliers like Big Ethel, whose size and shape was itself meant to be read as a joke.
Hanley himself eventually offers an answer for the focus on the girls over Archie in his conclusion, writing:
It's not easy to be a teenage girl. It never has been, ever since teenagers were "invented" in the mid-1940s. Society constantly devalues young women, pulling off the bizarre feat of simultaneously infantilizing and sexualizing them. Mentally, they're treated like children, their opinions and emotions dismissed and ignored. Physically, they're objectified by adult men who should know better yet leer and harass them with near impunity. Our world is not constructed for teenage girls to thrive. These years are a gauntlet they have to survive.
Betty and Vernoica are familiar with this gauntlet.
He goes on to write that despite the fact that most of their 80 years have been defined by middle-aged men, writing and drawing them in comedic narratives that often sought to define them as love interests and sexual objects, compelling counter-narratives also evolved, sometimes by happenstance, sometimes through market demand and sometimes by deliberate contributions from creators.
Their friendship, and their support for one another against the patriarchy and the expectations of a male-centric Riverdale (and world) gave them an inspirational power: "Despite their spats, their friendship was ultimately more important than any boy, any dress, or any dates," Hanley concludes. "That Betty and Veronica returned to it again and again showed generations of young female readers that even if society devalues them, they should still value each other."
The book, written in Hanely's highly readable, inviting and always reasonable sounding prose, follows the history of the characters from the founding of MLJ in 1939 to the third season of Riverdale, where Lili Reinhart's Betty and Camila Mendes' Veronica seem to represent highly evolved, "final" versions of the characters, invoking all of their strengths and virtues—and that of their friendship—in a show that Hanley calls "ludicrous"...though not as an insult (Not being much of a TV person, I've never watched the show, but everything I've ever heard about it sounds completely bonkers; indeed, just what Hanely writes about here seems like so much, from organized crime to biker gangs to cults to a serial killer based on an old MLJ hero, and that was just the third season; how batshit did things get by the seventh and final season?).
That means Hanley book about Betty and Veronica doesn't just cover the evolution of the North American comics industry, and Archie's survival of its many challenges (Helped along by the teen comedy genre being spared during the post-war superhero crash, Goldwater's role in crafting and easily adhering to the Comics Code Authority that spelled doom for then-popular comics genres like crime and horror and their embrace of the digest format as the comic book market contracted into adult male-centric specialty shops). Nor does it just cover the publisher's embrace of certain trends, which weren't always as applicable to the publisher's works (like that of the event-ification trend following DC's "Death of Superman" story).
No, the book also, obviously, follows the broad shifts in the depiction and characterization of the girls over the years, including at least one extremely weird detour that had perhaps unintended effects, like the vilification of Veronica (That would be born-again Christian cartoonist Al Hartley's use of the characters as tools of evangelical Christianity, not strictly limited to the licensed Spire Comics, as I always thought, but also, oddly, within the pages of Archie Comics proper for a bit).
And, of course, the book also covers the various attempts at mass media adaptation for Archie and the gang (and other Archie Comics characters like Josie and Sabrina, The Teenage Witch), which, over the decades, meant both successes and failures. You're probably familiar with all of the former, like The Monkees-esque pop music career of The Archies, the Saturday morning cartoons, that weird 1990 NBC Sunday night movie about the characters' high school reunion and, of course, Riverdale. But there were also a few radio shows, and plenty of failures, like a few other attempts at live-action television, one at a reality show and, of course, there were Hollywood hopes, of which only 2001's (excellent, for the record) Josie and The Pussycats ever came to fruition.
Thorough without ever becoming overwhelming and insightful while avoiding rabbit holes, Hanley's Betty and Veronica is really a must-read, not simply for those interested in the sociological underpinnings of female comics characters, but for fans of Betty and Veronica, Archie Comics or, indeed, comics in general.
(I just regret I waited some five and a half years to finally pluck it off my dusty to-read pile. Sorry, Tim Hanley!)
(Also, as is always the case with such histories, if one does come to them as late as I did here, I find that one may be curious about what the author would make of later updates in the subject matter. For example, I mentioned wondering what Hanley might have made of the later seasons of Riverdale, as I assume the show just got crazier and more outlandish as it went on, as is always the case of such television melodramas and, um, a lot of comic book series. Where Hanley leaves off with the comics, they are still sort of leaning into the Afterlife with Archie and Riverdale-inspired contrast between the publisher's decades-long squeaky clean image and more violent, scary or just plain unlikely subject matter, as seen in the likes of Vampironica, Jughead: The Hunger, Betty & Veronica: Vixens, Archie vs. Predator and so on, a contrast seemingly first exploited in 1994's Archie Meets the Punisher which, remarkably, is not currently available from Marvel and/or Archie. I do find myself wondering if the publisher's relative success in the direct market and trade paperback market with these efforts, as well as their 2015 "reboot", came at the cost of success in the post-Raina Telgemeier's Baby Sitter's Club world of original graphic novels produced for children, a world I spend a lot of time in as a contributor to Good Comics for Kids. Archie has produced a few works for this market, 2020's Betty & Veronica: The Bond of Friendship by Jamie Lee Rotante and Brittney Williams comes most immediately to mind, but, for the most part, the publisher doesn't seem to have made a priority of this apparently lucrative market, which would seem to be a natural audience for them, given their long appeal to young readers, boys and girls alike. They do have plenty of digests and collections in print, of course, but I read so many original graphic novels for and about middle-schoolers and teens that I'm surprised that Archie doesn't more actively chase such readers; I mean, even DC Comics seems to produce more material for this market than Archie does. I wonder if, had Hanley's book come out in 2025, if there would have been a chapter on this emergent market, and Archie Comics' efforts, or lack thereof, to introduce them to their eternal teenage characters...)
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