When you talk about the great regular Archie artists, it’s a pantheon: Bob Montana! Harry Lucey!  Dan DeCarlo! Stan Goldberg! Even though each of those artists got to toil on the flagship Archie title for decades, they made their mark.

But Jughead, who had his own comic title from the 1940s into the first decade of the 21st century? Only two main artists shaped him as a leading hero in all that time.

Samm Schwartz and Rex Lindsey.

I place Schwartz right up there with DeCarlo and Lucey. His amazing fluid pages, where a character might set a foot outside the line of the enclosing panel, were masterful. His use of silhouettes was unparalleled, his background gags inspired. In league with the lead Archie writers Frank Doyle and George Gladir, Schwartz gave Jughead the style and stature to star convincingly in his own comic. Schwartz also gave Jughead a look that set him apart from all the other Archie titles.

Rex Lindsey inherited the Jughead book from Schwartz and turned the title into longform, even multi-issue stories. The art was more Archie-conventional, and the supporting cast broadened in a way that made the stories seem shallower and Jughead more of an all-purpose weirdo. But the Lindsey made some lasting contributions to Jughead’s character: making the young drummer a blues enthusiast, for instance, or giving him a baby sister (Jellybean), or having one of his greatest female foils be an amateur psychologist, Trula Twist, driven to uncover the deeper motives for Jughead’s distrust of women.

The Jughead book closed down a few years ago now. Still waiting for phase three for happen.

When I was in Montreal this past July, I searched the newsstands (that city still has newsstands) for French-language Archie comics. Found a few digests, including Sélection Betty et Véronica #808.

When I was younger, Canadian Archie comics were ramshackle affairs—black and white reprints of the color originals, with French translations poorly pencilled in to the whited-out speech balloons. These days, the Canadian editions are identical to their American cousins, the text professionally done and fitting cleanly into the balloons. The stories are in color and the covers seem even slicker and more colorful than the U.S. versions.

The translations are fully wrought, right down to vernacular interjections and sound effects. When our heroines see a picture of someone they believe to be Mr. Weatherbee on a “Most Wanted”-type TV show and are informed he’s a master criminal, Veronica’s reaction is “Gak!!” while Betty’s is “iiiii!!” A sign on a building is redone to read “Alors,” while an artsy coffeehouse has the name Hargne du Petit Patelin.

Each culture should own their own Archie. Canada’s modified theirs admirably..