Rather amazingly, seven of the 11 titles Archie Comics had on the newsstands in May 1966 featured superheroes, at least on their covers.
Archie Comics had been an early adopter in the Silver Age revival of superheroes. They tried The Double Life of Private Strong, The Adventures of the Fly in 1959, and The Jaguar in 1961. The Fly, the Jaguar, and Fly Girl were featured in backup stories in Pep and Laugh. Then, in mid-decade, the publisher doubled down on derring-do.
“What’s interesting about the Archie superhero transformations is that it predated the advent of the Batman television show by a full five months,” noted Carl Thiel. “The first Pureheart the Powerful story appeared in Life with Archie 42 (Oct. 1965).”
Archie also revived the Fly after a six-month publishing hiatus, renaming him Fly-Man and giving him new powers and teammates drawn from the company’s deep bench in 1940s superheroes.
“Superheroes were red-hot in the mid-1960s, and they only got hotter when Batman showed up on TV screens in January 1966,” wrote comics historian Mitchell Brown. “Companies not named DC or Marvel hopped on that bandwagon as fast as they could, resurrecting their dormant heroes or coming up with new ones.
“Over at Archie, they went both ways: bringing back the masked adventurers from MLJ’s Golden Age and turning the Riverdale gang into superheroes (or, in Reggie’s case, a supervillain). Archie became Pureheart, Betty became Super Teen, Reggie became Evilheart, Veronica became… well, no one until they made her Miss Vanity in 1994. (Man, the fabulously rich and beautiful women of the world just can’t get a break.) And Mr. Forsythe P. ‘Jughead’ Jones became Captain Hero, burger-powered champion of justice!”
“I think it helped that no one seemed to have any real grasp on what his powers were. He was strong, sure, but he also appeared to be whatever the story required him to be, and he would pull gadgets like a radio headset out of thin air. Not that I’m complaining — a hero whose strength is fueled by burgers is probably not meant to be taken too seriously.”
“1966 was a banner year for comic books, the kind of cultural explosion that pops up every so often and reminds everyone that the comic medium still exists,” wrote Matthew Peterson.
Archie published three superhero-related giant comics that summer — Archie’s Super Hero Special (i.e., Archie’s Giant Series Magazine 142, featuring the Riverdale crowd); Adventures of Little Archie 40 (featuring Little Pureheart) and Super Heroes Versus Super Villains 1 (featuring Archie’s “serious” superheroes, then penned by Jerry Siegel).
Archie was concurrently publishing The Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. (“Really Impressive Vast Enterprise for Routing Dangerous Adversaries, Louts, Etc.”). That James Bond/Man from UNCLE parody series showcased Archie and his pals as secret agents battling the same sort of costumed supervillains that Pureheart and company tackled.
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