On a dead-end street in a Mamaroneck district of small business offices, machine and auto shops and warehouses, a timeless all-American place and increasingly global enterprise, “Riverdale,” still thrives. It thrives at a pace of $18 million to $20 million in annual revenue for its private owners.
At 325 Fayette Ave., the comic-book characters are life-sized and long-proven good earners. At the top of the stairs over a warehouse where the company SUV”™s license plates are stamped “JUGHEAD,” beanie-crowned Jughead Jones races past hall lockers and a student desk straight out of ”™50s-era Riverdale High. That forever-17 freckled redhead, Archie Andrews, in vintage high-school letter sweater, shows the way to the men”™s room in the 7,000-square-foot warren of offices where 20 employees work in a casual ambiance ”“ denim shirts on the top brass, lunch-recess Whiffle ball in the art department – at Archie Comic Publications Inc. Veronica Lodge and Betty Cooper, still teenage pals and romantic rivals through seven decades of cartoonist evolutions in dress and hair styles, hang around, too.
The couch in the narrow lobby is fashioned from the trunk of a tail-finned Cadillac, circa early Elvis, flanked by drive-in movie speakers. The neon-lit wall clock ”“ “It”™s Time to Eat,” it reads ”“ and the neon-lit juke box in a corner could have been recycled from Pop Tate”™s Chocklit Shoppe in Riverdale.
“In our little world here, we really do believe that Archie and Betty and Veronica are real people,” said Michael I. Silberkleit, 69-year-old chairman and publisher of the company started by his late father, Louis Silberkleit, and two partners in the Western Union Building in downtown Manhattan in 1939.
Fitting then, that those characters should have their own blogs at the company”™s closely monitored Web site, www.archiecomics.com. There Archie”™s wholesome gang have complained to responsive management about the edgy, more realistically contemporary looks given them by artists for a recent four-issue story. Readers complained too in letters and e-mails, which “just enforced to me how popular this property is,” Silberkleit said.
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“Now we”™re getting thousands of blogs from kids” on a Web site that gets 20 million hits a month, he said. That”™s in addition to the twice-daily deliveries of fan mail in envelopes crammed with young fans”™ character drawings and notes and instructions (“Show it just like it is,” a 7-year-old contributing artist from Stockton, Calif., recently demanded).
“Our readers are 7 to 14, 60 percent female,” Silberkleit said. Many of their parents and grandparents were Archie comics readers, too.
Archie Comics, which also owns other cartoon properties such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats, sells 600,000 units a month in the U.S and has about 100,000 subscribers. The daily Archie comic strip is syndicated in about 75 newspapers worldwide, compared with about 1,000 newspaper outlets in its first decade in the ”™40s, Silberkleit said. Archie comics in compact digest editions are sold at grocery-store checkout counters and Wal-Mart stores across the U.S. and Canada. The Archie brand also retails in the major chain bookstores, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, and in 3,000 independent comic-book shops.
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“We actually have to buy that wire (display rack) at every Wal-Mart store, at every grocery store checkout counter,” Silberkleit said. “It costs us over seven figures, about $1 million, to buy the wire” annually.
Silberkleit said U.S. sales make up about 60 percent of the company”™s business and Canadian sales about 30 percent. The remainder comes from a growing international audience of Riverdale fans led by India.
“It”™s very popular in the country of India,” where a “booming” middle class represents a target market “larger than the entire population of the U.S.,”™ Silberkleit noted. The company has shipped remaindered comics there for 40 years. Using digital desktop technology and the Internet, it now outsources to India its color separations for comic-book pages printed at Quebecor World Inc. in Montreal.
This year, Archie Comics executives added an Indian character, Raj Patel, to Archie”™s increasingly ethnically diverse gang in Riverdale. “When we made that announcement, we were swamped with inquiries from India,” Silberkleit said.
The company is negotiating a licensing deal to print Archie comics there in Hindi. It already licenses translations in Arabic, Greek, French, Spanish, the Scandinavian languages and Vietnamese, Silberkleit said. A Russian edition ended when the company broke ties with a Russian licensee that didn”™t pay its bills.
Archie Comics also has tapped a growing market in Mexico, where a Spanish-language edition is licensed to a Mexico City publisher, Vanguardia Editores. A Mexican character, Tono Diaz, nicknamed “Tony,” has joined the Riverdale gang.
“We are exploring vigorously that whole Hispanic market in the U.S.” and looking for a Southwest distributor of the Mexican edition, Silberkleit said.
He and his business partner and co-publisher, Richard H. Goldwater, moved the company to this  gritty industrial part of Mamaroneck about 25 years ago to work closer to their Westchester County homes. Goldwater, a White Plains resident, died at 71 in October, and his death ended a two-generation history of family partnership. It also inspired hundreds of condolence notes from readers on the company Web site.
Goldwater”™s father, John, who owned a magazine export business, joined Silberkleit”™s father ”“ a publisher of pulp fiction penned, at an eighth of a cent a word, by future best-selling writers such as Isaac Asimov and Harold Robbins ”“ and a third partner, Maurice Coyne, in founding MLJ Publishing, a publisher of superhero comics. Two years later, John Goldwater conceived the comic character Archie Andrews, modeling him after young Mickey Rooney”™s then-popular film character, Andy Hardy. The partners hired cartoonist Bob Montana to draw Goldwater”™s brainchild and the rest of the original Archie crew.
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“Basically they were young kids living in a small town,” Silberkleit said of the creator”™s enduring concept. “It”™s small-town middle America, where nothing bad ever happens.”
That small town was not modeled after the like-named Riverdale section of the Bronx. “I”™m not sure when they created Archie that they even knew there”™s a Riverdale in the Bronx,” said Silberkleit fils. Among Archie devotees, Riverdale”™s real-life model remains a subject of mystery, geographical claim and counterclaim and speculation.
The first Pep Comics issue featuring Archie came out in December 1941, two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America”™s entry into World War II. The next month, “Archie” made its debut as a stand-alone comic. The timing was right.
With soldiers mobilizing for war while Archie stayed in high school, “They needed something to read,” Silberkleit said. Archie comics quickly passed muster among the uniformed ranks.
At the start, “They sold maybe a million copies,” said Silberkleit. “It was phenomenal. They sold for only 10 cents. It was quite a bargain, 64 pages for only 10 cents.”
In the ”™70s, Archie Comic Publications Inc. went public, as Silberkleit looked to raise funds to expand the familiar brand into the franchise restaurant business. Working with a former beef-and-brew restaurant franchise in Chicago, the company opened two Archie”™s restaurants in Joliet, Ill., and Gary, Ind.
They served no brew, in keeping with the comic-book publisher”™s fixed ban on drinking, smoking, drug-taking, nudity, violence, subverting good dental and personal hygiene, driving without a seat belt and any other illegal acts to which juveniles might be prone anywhere but in fictional and reliably wholesome Riverdale.
“They were immediately successful,” Silberkleit said. “Unfortunately the negative was, it was absentee management,” which led Archie Comics to shut down the Midwest restaurants. “The concept was spectacular. Even to this day I”™d love to talk to somebody about doing a pilot Archie”™s restaurant and starting a franchise.”
At the time of that ”™70s venture, though, corporate raiders had set their sights on the publicly traded company, and Silberkleit feared a takeover of the second-generation, two-family business. “There was no way I could accept that because we were the founders and creators and there was no way we were going to be thrown out on the streets,” he said.
The founders”™ sons paid several million dollars to outbid raiders and take the company private. “We ended up owning the company, the two of us,” Silberkleit said.
“I just felt being a public company was more trouble than it was worth. Deep down we”™re just a comic-book publishing company. It”™s not like we are building a mega-conglomerate.”
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In 2003, the company formed a division, Archie Entertainment L.L.C., that operates from a four-person office in Norwalk, Conn. Headed by CEO Chuck Grimes, a Norwalk attorney who became president of Archie Comics after Goldwater”™s death, the division handles the development of television, film, Internet and entertainment media projects and licensing and marketing worldwide of the Archie Comics brands. Those include reissues of the Archie animated cartoons launched on TV in 1969.
For the Archie enterprise, “I think the wave of the future is going to be more digital stuff on TV” using interactive media, Silberkleit said.
Though they haven”™t aged, Archie and his pals have kept current with technology. Text-messaging has replaced scribbled notes passed between them. They keep up their Web blogs.
At Archie Comics, longevity seems shared by both employees and characters. Silberkleit joined the business about 50 years ago, as did his recently deceased partner. Victor Gorelick, vice president and managing editor, joined the company 49 years ago as a student cartoonist hired as an art department assistant. One of his first jobs, he recalled, was “taking out cleavage and navels on Katy Keene,” another Riverdale character outside Archie”™s inner circle, to avoid censorship by the nation”™s former Comics Code Authority.
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Among a far-flung freelance corps of about 35 writers, writer-artists and artists used by Archie Comics, one writer has contributed for about 40 years and a cartoon inker and letterer has more than 30 years with the company, Gorelick said.
“Our goal is to eventually have our family come into the business and keep it as a family,” said Silberkleit, who keeps an early company photo of the three founding partners on his office wall. “But certainly nothing is going to change.”
Nothing much ever does in Riverdale.
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