Quote from: Vegan Jughead on September 09, 2017, 01:01:56 PM
I have that book and i love that book, but even I, as a HUGE Lucey fan, was a bit taken back at his use of "by far". I think he was just trying to be edgy since Dan DeCarlo is assumed by most casual observers to be THE Archie artist.
For B&V, in that era I'll take DeCarlo. If I can go across all eras, I'll take Dan Parent or Bob Montana, although I love Jeff Shultz's DeCarlo tribute style as well.
I like Dan Parent's B&V, but Montana and DeCarlo drew during what in my opinion was a high point for women's fashion, so I guess I like Parent's Betty and Veronica heads and Montana and DeCarlo from the neck down. Ha ha.
For the late '40s and early '50s, it's Bob Montana setting the pace and leading the way (on the newspaper strip and some covers), but as we get to the mid-'50s in the comic books, Harry Lucey began to emerge as the dominant artist, and it was he who largely defined the characters for the next decade's comic books. Overlapping in the early '60s, Dan DeCarlo's version begins to overtake Lucey's as the preeminent B&V depiction, which is pretty well solidified by the later '60s when DeCarlo becomes the main cover artist for all the comics. Lucey's artistic powers began fading in the 1970s comics due to his deteriorating health, and he retired completely in 1976. DeCarlo's dominance just continued to build in the 1970s, adding the newspaper strip to his duties when Bob Montana died in 1975. Becoming the main cover artist, and then the newspaper strip artist, is about all the validation needed to confirm that by the later 1970s, "the traditional Archie Comics style" had become Dan DeCarlo's style.
When discussing the Silver Age artists, one that never seems to get mentioned, or enough credit, is Bob White. He was brought into ACP's production department in the late '50s by Bob Bolling, and when he got to work on the main characters in the '60s, being new to the genre, he seemed to have a strong desire to prove his worth to the company by remaining faithful to the house style of the period, taking most of his artistic cues from DeCarlo's and Lucey's work (and maybe a little bit of Bob Montana). His work can be found in and on the covers of early-1960s issues of Archie and Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica, and he was also a regular contributor to Archie's Madhouse. But he seems to be primarily remembered as the artist on those 1965-1967 issues of Life With Archie that featured Pureheart the Powerful, The Man From R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E., and the prototype 3-man version of The Archies. His most distinctive contribution to the company remains the delightfully wonky Cosmo the Merry Martian, which he created, wrote and drew.
A couple of examples of Bob White's covers for Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica.
In the later 1990s, when Dan Parent began to emerge from DeCarlo's mentoring into his own, it seems like he and Jeff Schulz are pretty much neck-and-neck as B&V artists, but Dan Parent was becoming more the signature artist for Veronica. He also helped to launch Cheryl and Sabrina in their own late-1990s comics, eventually turning Cheryl over to Holly G. (who afterwards moved on to Josie and the Pussycats, and then Sabrina). Holly's slightly manga-influenced take on all those characters gave them a fresh look. She also broke away from the traditional method of drawing the girls' eyes as simple black dots with a single ink line representing the eyelash in medium and close-up panels, giving them delicate eyelashes and colored irises, which made them seem more expressive. Holly didn't do many B&V stories, but the one where Betty gets a Goth makeover is memorable.
Then in the 2000s, Dan is allowed to express his own individual style a lot more, and definitely becomes the iconic cover artist for both B&V. Breaking away from the DeCarlo influence a little, he develops a lot of his own signature facial expressions for the girls. Dan's abilities as a graphic designer really begin to impress me at about the time Betty & Veronica Spectacular gets a makeover as a fashion magazine-styled comic (#69-90), and that's about the time that I'd say he "owned" those characters, despite some nice work from Jeff continuing on interior B&V stories. Dan gets to do some fun stuff, like the storybook tales (Wonderland and Oz) and Agents B&V in the digests around the same time. And yes, Dan Parent definitely picked up on the fashion-conscious vibe that DeCarlo had paid real attention to, adding to that contemporary sensibility. I notice in a few of their most recent stories that the brothers Kennedy are really starting to pay attention to B&V's fashions, too.