Like I wrote in a previous Comic Book Compulsive back in the Golden Age one tip off that a long running anthology title was very near it’s end was when they started adding back-ups featuring teenagers. I present into evidence…

Speedy Hopper…

…and Zippie from EXCITING COMICS.

Rims from FEATURE COMICS #135

Even Fawcett, publisher of Captain Marvel tried their hand at the genre. One of their teens was Freshman Freddy who appeared in the latter issues of Whiz Comics, a college student who spent nearly every waking moment trying to avoid the unwarranted abuse of psychotic upper class men.

Fawcett thought so much of Ozzie, their other teen, they had him replace Mary Marvel in Wow Comics where he was regularly cover featured. He was considered enough of a success to graduate to his own title, Ozzie and Babs which ran for thirteen issues. There he was teamed with supposed girlfriend Babs, though to me their relationship was more reminiscent of Abbott & Costello than Archie & Veronica. Even by the standards of comic book teenagers Ozzie, who looked a lot like a stretched and squashed Dagwood Bumstead, was an hapless idiot. Plus he possessed such remarkable low self esteem that when Babs needed a big story for the school paper he let her browbeat him into biting a dog (as in the phrase ‘man bites dog’).

Both managed to have something of a second life when Charlton bought the rights to some of the Fawcett characters, as was pointed out to me by Steven Thompson in his always interesting blog Four-Color Shadows (http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2010/08/freshman-freddy-brenda-starr-1955.html).

Lev Gleason had Dilly who popped up in the back pages of both Boy and Daredevil comics before getting his own title which lasted three issues.

DC had a couple of other teen titles that had shorter runs than Buzzy, Binky or Scooter. Nearsighted and on the short side, you’d think Sheldon Mayer’s signature character Scribbly the Boy Cartoonist (who sadly, if remembered at all its through his association with Ma Hunkel, the original Red Tornado) could have gotten a job as Buzzy or Binky’s sidekick. But instead this atypical comic book teen got his own title in 1948 which lasted for fifteen issues. He started pretty much where he left off in 1944 when he made his last appearance in All-American Comics, a kid desperate to become a cartoonist. But his dreams got quickly sidetracked by more typical teenager concerns, in particular a sweet girl named Clover and a brutish rival in the form of a slab of meat named Bentley.

I’m told Scribbly appeared briefly in Crisis On Infinite Earths (that’s what the internet says anyway; I couldn’t swear to it) and sadly hasn’t been seen since. I say it’s long past time he had a sentimental Christmas reunion with Ma Hunkel in the pages of Justice Society of America. But nobody asked me.

As well as Everything Happens to Harvey, which lasted 7 issues

And Here’s Howie which lasted 18 issues. He began as a conventional teen title but in #5 he joined the army.

When Marvel was Timely they had a number of would-be Archies, like Georgie here, but I don’t have nearly enough of the Timely teen titles yet to write about them even semi-intelligently, so…

…instead I’ll skip ahead to when Marvel was Atlas and write semi-intelligently about Homer Hooper which ran for four issues. Over the last year I’ve read a lot of teen titles, enough to know that many of them weren’t direct copies of Archie Comics. But Homer Hooper by Stan Lee and Hy Rosen, came about as close to Archie as you could get without getting sued.

And then when Marvel was Marvel and superheroes weren’t selling that well they inexplicably did seven issues of Harvey, a very 70′s take on teenagers that’s also a little too close to the actual article for my comfort It’s credited to Stan Lee and not credited to Stan Goldberg who produces some very nice Archie style art.

And that’s pretty much it for my overview of Archie’s rivals. There are still some teen comics I’d like to write about individually — but I’m guessing that we could all use a change of subject.