Remembering the Superheroes of Archie Comics

During one of my mom's frequent top-to-bottom housecleaning adventures, she came across a nostalgic keepsake from my childhood, tucked away for years on a bookshelf or in the back of a closet somewhere or maybe in the attic or basement.  It didn't matter to me where she found it, I was just thrilled when she presented it to me one morning this week when I brought my daughter over for her to kindly babysit -- it was a copy of Super Hero Comics Digest Magazine #2, which I read from cover to cover countless times as a kid.  Although I favored the more mainstream DC Comics and Marvel Comics, the digest was published by Archie Comics. 

Looking at it now, dog-eared after many page-turning days and nights from my youth, but still in good condition, it brought back fond memories.  Archie Comics were known to me as "the funnies," not the more serious adventures of good vs. evil in the DC and Marvel universes.  (Yes, for a nine-year-old kid, those stories were very serious indeed.) Still, this digest was a collection of different heroes -- the Black Hood (who resembled Lee Majors a bit during his Six Million Dollar Man heyday), the patriotic Shield (who seemed to be a total rip-off of Captain America, but I later discovered was first published more than a year earlier than Marvel's supersoldier), and the mysterious Fox. 

Later in life I learned that these heroes were actually created during the Golden Age of comics under the banner of MLJ Magazines, which preceded Archie Comics.  Eventually, the characters would fall under the ownership of DC, part of its complex "infinite planets" continuity.  Steel Sterling, the Fly, the Web -- to my juvenile eyes and imagination, these were terrific heroes. 

The digest had a mix of genres from the gothic horror story "The Ultimate Power" to the vampire science fiction tale "Time Twist" to the mythic parable "The Beast in the Forest," but the superhero tales were my favorites, such as Hangman and the Jaguar.

Even the typically silly folks at Riverdale High became superheroic in the pages of this digest -- Archie was Pureheart the Powerful, Betty was Superteen, Jughead was Captain Hero, Reggie was Evilheart, Veronica was Miss Vanity, and Moose was Mighty Moose.   

Even though some of my other comics were lost forever, I'm glad some of them still survived, if for nothing else than the joyful memories they uncover all these years later of those childhood moments spent escaping into the imaginary world of superheroes.