To Betty’s horror and Archie’s delight, Magnet Girl could transform the randy redhead into a literal “girl magnet.”
The story Maid of Mischief in Betty and Me 4 (Oct. 1966) carefully kept the characters’ concerns consistent, even in the midst of superhero parody. The theme of attraction was always present, whether the Archie gang was superhuman or mundane.
Armed with her Adheso Belt and Magnetray Gun, Magnet Girl was a beach meanie, turning Betty’s Superteen into a crab magnet and Veronica into a mustard magnet.
But Superteen turned the tables by using Magnet Girl’s master controls to change her from a money magnet into a seagull magnet.
“It’s like she was a beautiful bird instead of an ugly, wingless human,” says one of the gulls.
“I saw her first!”
“She’s mine!”
“My! What an awful lot of seagulls!!” exclaims the nervous super-vixen, just before the birds carry her off to a smelly city garbage island to tempt her with such delicacies as live baby eels.
The story by writer Frank Doyle and artist Dan DeCarlo was reprinted in 1978 (Archie’s Super Hero Special 1) and 2024 (Archie 1,000 Page Comics Triumph).
Originally a daydream figure in Betty and Veronica 118 (Oct. 1965), Superteen became “real” as time went on (paralleling Wonder Girl’s evolution, oddly enough).
A twist of her pony tail turned Betty into Superteen, enabling her to “…fly, survive clubs and stones thrown by Veronica, beat up her rival, fly off with Archie, electrify him with her ‘super kisses,’ and incidentally fight crime,” noted comics historian Jeff Rovin.
Ironically, the story that introduced Superteen was titled Just Imagine (a DC house ad slogan that I repurposed as a blog title).
Betty Cooper — bright, cheerful, earnest and honest — seems like a likely candidate for being a superhero. And, much as I always admired her, Veronica Lodge does not. I guess I was intrigued by girls who had some guile, an “edge.” Veronica did eventually become a superhero, but it took decades.
Girl-crazy Archie Andrews became Pureheart the Powerful, of course, and it amused me that he would lose his purity-powered, amnesia-inducing abilities when he experienced what we would describe (but the comics would not) as lust.
His pal Jughead Jones was Captain Hero, not a sidekick but a highly effective if unorthodox superhero.
The one who confused me was Reggie Mantle as Evilheart, an egotistical schemer who fought alongside the heroes but sometimes undermined them. Was he hero or villain? I suppose he could best be described as a super-antihero.
“As a kid reading these comics, it gave me great satisfaction to see the Archie characters my older sister was reading turned into superheroes!” Guy Colston recalled. “It validated everything I idolized.”
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