Bob Montana

Robert William Montana (October 23, 1920 – January 4, 1975) was an American comic strip artist who created the original likenesses for characters published by Archie Comics and in the newspaper strip Archie.

Early life
He was born in Stockton, California, to Roberta Pandolfini Montana and Ray Montana. Both were in show business: Roberta had been a Ziegfeld girl, and Ray performed banjo on the vaudeville circuit. As a result, Bob Montana traveled extensively as a child. He attended Haverhill High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts. and graduated from Manchester High School Central in Manchester, New Hampshire.

According to Jane (Donahue) Murphy, a high school classmate of Montana's, Archie and his friends were based on people from their hometown and high school. She said Archie Andrews was based on Donahue's cousin, Richard Heffernan; Veronica Lodge on Agatha Popoff, the daughter of the local football team's doctor; Jughead Jones on a mischievous teen named "Skinny" Linnehan; while Miss Grundy may have been based on a high school typing and shorthand teacher named Lundstrom; however, Haverhill's school librarian is also believed to be the model for Grundy.

Career
While freelancing at True Comics and Fox Comics, Montana created an adventure strip about four teenage boys and tried to sell it without success.

Archie Comics
When Montana started working for MLJ Comics he was asked to work up a high-school style comic-strip story, featuring Archie Andrews.

Bob Montana presented his four-boy strip to John Goldwater while working as a freelance artist at MLJ. Goldwater thought it would be more appealing to feature two boys and two girls than four boys. Goldwater liked the name Archibald (after a friend) but Montana liked Chick. They settled on Archie. Montana and Harry Lucey collaborated on the first Comic book Story which was featured in Pep Comics (Dec. 1941) and its popularity led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (Nov. 1942). After serving in WW2, in 1946, Montana was soon drawing the Archie comic newspaper strip, doing both the daily and Sunday strip, which over the next 35 years ran in over 750 newspapers worldwide.

Personal life
Montana served 3½ years in WWII and was a sergeant at war's end; during this time, he met and married Peggy Bertholet. They had four children: Paige, Lynn, Ray and Don.

He died at age 54 of an apparent heart attack while cross-country skiing near his New Hampshire home.