Samm Schwartz Addenda

Three Four addenda to my post on Samm Schwartz:

1) Schwartz's friend and MLJ co-worker Joe Edwards said in an interview with Jim Amash in Alter Ego magazine that Schwartz added the extra "M" to the end of his first name -- he had previously been known just as "Sam" -- for no reason, "just to be different." Shades of Ted(d) Pierce.

2) After writing it, I found another article about the launch of the "new" Jughead series in 1987. It doesn't mention Schwartz, but it says that the new series and the new approach -- trying to give him a love triangle a la Archie -- was a response to the "flagging sales" of the title and the perception that girls didn't want to read about the adventures of a woman hater. That suggests that the removal of Schwartz was part of the attempt to give the title a more girl-friendly feel. The love-triangle thing didn't last, of course, because nobody wants to see Jughead that way (as the company had already learned in 1978-9 -- but that's a story for another time). The reason I liked Jughead stories the best as a kid are probably the very reasons why they were the least favorite of the comic's broad readership: they are basically pure amoral comedy, almost like old-school studio cartoons (the best Archie stories are a lot like classic cartoons: variations on a theme), and while Jughead is a generally good guy when it counts, he's a terrible role model for kids. (This was actually the subject of a Schwartz-drawn story where two kids start to admire Jughead because he proves that you can eat anything you want and not get fat). The love-triangle experiment failed, but Jughead continued to succumb to the epidemic of Nice that had turned all the main characters into shadows of their '50s and '60s selves.
Update: Here's a scan of the news article I mentioned (click to enlarge):



3) Sam(m) Schwarts not only drew himself into the strip frequently, in the form of posters telling us to "vote for Sam" (or "Samm" depending on which spelling he felt like using), but when he moved to Miami, he drew a story -- I'm not sure if he wrote it or if Doyle did it -- called "Sam has moved to Miami," where Jughead is distraught because his unseen friend Sam has left town and moved to, well, I've already said it twice. The underlying joke of the story is that the never-seen Sam clearly wants to get the heck away from the freeloading Jughead. But it's got to be one of the few stories in this comic's history that's (sort of) about one of the cartoonists, and I fully expect the name "Sam" to be replaced by some other name if they ever reprint it in a digest. Note the Schwartz trademark of Jughead's feet straggling into the panels below him.



4) My earlier post about Schwartz's "El Slobador" story has been revised to include some screencaps. Turns out it was from 1974 rather than later, as I originally thought. It has to be one of the few issues of Jughead that's all one story instead of three or four separate ones.

A Closer Look at Samm Schwartz

It's been long enough since my last Archie-related post (these posts are an outgrowth of some research I was doing) that I can justify posting this article I found around that time: what I believe is one of the few newspaper articles on Samm Schwartz, if not the only one. It's from the February 21, 1985 edition of the Miami Herald, written by Constance Prater.

One thing I should say before getting to the article is that Schwartz's work on Jughead -- which as I've said numerous times, is some of my favorite work in any comic book, from any company, superhero, cartoon, whatever -- actually got better after his company was no longer as good.

Schwartz was with MLJ/Archie almost from the beginning (he may have been brought in by his friend Joe Edwards), and he always did good work; he later became the primary Jughead artist and soon became synonymous with that character, whose humor and stories were a little different from everybody else's. (Archie's most popular character with its predominantly female audience is Betty, but I suspect that with boy readers, Jughead is the favorite; he certainly was mine.) In the mid-'60s Schwartz was lured away by the ill-fated Tower Comics to be one of their editors and artists; he drew most of the "Tippy Teen" comics. When Tower folded, he went back to Archie, which really needed him back: in his absence, the art on Jughead had been suffering badly. (When Schwartz left, the title was given to another veteran, Bill Vigoda, who simply wasn't as good.)

Schwartz's work after coming back to Archie was even better than it had been before, loosened up by his experience at Tower. He started throwing in more crazy background gags of his own, and returning to the '40s/'50s style of not respecting the boundaries of the panels: characters' legs and arms would protrude from one panel to another, they would stand on the speech balloons of the people in the panels below them:



Schwartz was also essentially a one-man operation. He did all the inking and lettering himself (even using the same lettering for nearly all his story titles); it was said that when they sent him a story, the editors never knew exactly what they were going to get until they received the completed black-and-white version.

Here's one of my favorite examples of Schwartz's elaborate bacgkround gags: while the exposition is going on, we see a complete story playing out in the background: somebody finds a bird in his locker, the bird flies over and snatches Mr. Weatherbee's toupee.



As the '70s went on and proceeded into the '80s, the artwork at Archie was no longer what it had been. Dan DeCarlo got kind of bland; Harry Lucey was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and retired in the middle of the decade; he was replaced with DeCarlo, his sons, and DeCarlo-alikes like Stan Goldberg. Schwartz (and Bolling, when he contributed) was immediately recognizable to a young reader as having a different, funnier style than the "house" style that had emerged.

But in 1987, as part of their big series of shakeups -- which included a bunch of new titles that failed -- Archie comics re-launched two of their most popular titles, Betty and Veronica and Jughead, with the same title but a new series (starting with a new issue # 1). DeCarlo continued to do the new B&V, up until the company ungratefully fired him and wrote him out of their history. But the new Jughead series was not drawn by Schwartz. He continued to do Jughead stories for the company, but he was no longer the primary Jughead artist. Maybe he was no longer able to do it on a regular basis, but I wouldn't be surprised if his look was considered too old-fashioned. Whatever the reason, that was the end of the last really first-rate series Archie ever did.

And with that, here is the article I should have posted earlier:

CARTOONIST'S WORK MORE THAN FUNNY PICTURES

SAMM SCHWARTZ HAS BEEN DRAWING JUGHEAD COMICS FOR 41 YEARS.

Jughead, the hamburger eating Riverdale High student of comic book fame, is up to his old tricks again. He has programmed the school's new robot teaching assistant to fetch French fries and hot dogs for his friends. Samm Schwartz looks up from the drawing board in his North Miami Beach home and smiles.

"You know it's not always easy being funny. It's a question of what's funny," said Schwartz, a 64-year-old cartoonist who has been sketching Jughead's antics with pencil and ink for nearly 40 years. "It's not so much me drawing funny pictures. I draw pictures of people doing funny things," said Schwartz.

His artwork -- glimpses of Archie, Betty, Veronica and the whole Riverdale High gang from Archie Comics -- has appeared in English, Spanish, French and Italian comic strips.

Drawing for a living isn't easy, Schwartz said. Like when he sits down at his drawing board and stares at a blank sheet of paper.

"You reach into the drawer and take out a mortgage bill, a phone bill or an electric bill and suddenly you're inspired," he said.

Schwartz "was good then and he's even better now," said fellow cartoonist Bob Bolling.

Bolling, of Miami Lakes, started drawing for Archie Comics 25 years ago. Schwartz was one of the first people he met.

Schwartz's artistic career began when he was a boy, drawing chalk caricatures of cowboys on the sidewalks in Brooklyn in the 1920s.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Project Administration paid for free art classes for him at neighborhood schools.

He also attended the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Arts, the National Academy of Art and Design and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

His parents told him he could never make a decent living as an artist.

"For a while, they were right," Schwartz said.

His first job was as an apprentice in one of New York's many fashion studios, drawing sketches of women's fashions for department stores.

"I was a glorified go-fer," he said.

He also got 60 cents for posing as a male fashion model.

Although the comic book craze began in the early 1920s, it didn't take off until 1938 and the beginning of World War II.

Comics were the most popular selling magazines then. The public's obsession with the pictured stories of heroes like Superman, Captain Marvel and Wee Willie Winkle helped fuel young Schwartz's passion for the art.

"People were hungry for entertaining reading. A lot of GIs read them, which is no reflection on their mentality," he said.

He took his sketches, pencils and ink and knocked on publishers' doors.

In 1942, he began drawing for M.L.J., which later became Archie Comics.

"I was just getting a toehold when I was drafted," he said.

For the next two years, Schwartz was a drill instructor, public relations specialist, visual training aide and radio and radar mechanic for the U.S. Air Force.

He was stationed in Bal Harbour for 19 months.

In his spare time, Schwartz made extra money drawing portraits of his buddies' girlfriends and wives.

After the war, he went back to Brooklyn and Archie.

He used to draw as well as write the scripts, but creating the stories was too strenuous.

"It's on your mind 24 hours a day. It's much easier for me to draw a person doing something than describe it. It got fatiguing," he said. "Afterward, I didn't have energy to draw."

Schwartz has lived in North Miami Beach since 1979. He said he enjoys being his own boss.

"You don't have to punch a time clock. You don't have to get dressed in the morning. I don't have to shave if I don't want to."

To wrap this up, here is a story from Schwartz's golden '70s/'80s period, a story that has haunted me ever since I read it as a child, even though -- then and now -- I could never tell you what the point of it is. Jughead is kidnapped by a cult whose leader wears a similar hat, has the legend "B.S." tattooed on his head, and whose God is named "Harold," and Schwartz plays the whole thing so deadpan that it really seems like this is just another irritating distraction for his favorite character.

The opening of the story also shows off another late Schwartz trademark: putting the credits in unusual places. Once he was allowed to include credits, he would frequently make them part of the scene, as he does here (and sometimes he'd turn them into one of his graffiti gags, calling himself "Good ol' Samm" or something like that). Click on a page to enlarge:

(1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6)

"It's the Chicago South Side Choir Society! It's their annual uplift cruise for Meditation Week!"

One more Archie-related story that I wanted to upload, this one drawn by Samm Schwartz. Schwartz was one of the great teen-comedy illustrators, both for Archie and outside titles like Tippy Teen. He always drew the characters in a way that always stood out in the digests; he was the guy who drew the characters in a way that was modern (unlike the stories that obviously came from the '40s or '50s) and yet very cartoony and not as prettied-up as the others; he wasn't exactly a sexy-girl artist, or at least he didn't draw the girls that way. Jughead stories were his specialty, and his best work was on the Jughead title in the '70s.

Some of his designs could be a little grotesque, like his Little Archie artwork, but at his best he was by far the funniest of the Archie artists, in part because he often felt free to throw in gags of his own: another thing that stood out about his stories was that he would have random characters doing funny things in the background, gags spilling out of one panel and into another, little things that weren't scripted but were thrown in because Samm thought they'd make the panel look funnier. Whenever Frank Doyle wrote a Schwartz story, the combination of Doyle's Vaudeville humor and Schwartz's deadpan humor was perfect; they were arguably the best writer-artist team Archie ever had.

I wish I had more Schwartz/Doyle stories than I do, but this story, drawn by Schwartz and probably written by Doyle, is a fairly good example of their work together, though it doesn't contain quite as many crazy throwaway gags as my very favorite Schwartz stories. But it does have the guy slipping on the ice in the first panel, and that broad pratfall in the background is very Schwartzian. The story itself starts out as a typical Frank Doyle patter/chatter about nothing, and then turns into a fantasy sequence where Jughead helps Al Capone (called by name, and puffing on cigars with lots of thick comedy smoke; two things the current title probably couldn't get away with) smuggle hamburgers into the U.S.





Update: After posting the above, I found, and scanned, the story I transcribed in my Frank Doyle post, "In Search of Sanity"; this story doesn't have a lot of background characters either, but it's a great showcase for Doyle's minimalist storytelling, and Schwartz's way of making that storytelling work; there's no plot, but there doesn't need to be when Schwartz makes these characters so much fun to hang out with. (Schwartz's take on all the characters is to make them as likable as they can be, even Veronica.)