Just curious. Are the girls and boys bodies Betty/Veronica and Archie/Reggie exactly
the same?
The girls’ bodies and faces are pretty much interchangeable, except for the short girl (I forget her name). Or they were back when I was reading those comics. I think that the boys’ bodies came in “normal”, plus whatever Jughead was, plus the football player’s body type.
In many comics, especially those drawn by men, females tend to have one face structure and body type, and maybe one or two unique females. The hairstyles and accessories will vary, and that’s how you tell the females apart.
There are three cartoonists who’ve tried to fight this lamentable, lazy trend–George Perez, Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez–and none of them has ever drawn Archie comics.
I never read Archie, but Colbert mentioned it in one of his shows and based on the art displayed, Betty and Veronica looked identical except for the hair.
The short girl is Midge, Big Moose’s “goil”. 
Most of the gils’ faces are similar, slightly varied by artist, except for Sabrina, who was originally designed with slanted eyes, & an upturned nose.
I don’t know any short girl (I suspect we read them in completely different eras), but there’s also Ethel, who was a completely different model than the others - tall, skinny, Jughead-style nose, big teeth… I see they’ve prettied her up a bit, recently (in fact, she’s pretty darn cute), but she’s still a departure from the Ronnie/Betty/Midge/Cheryl/Nancy body and face.
The boys have a bit more variety - Archie and Reggie are more or less the same, and Chuck is the same model in black, but then there’s Moose, Dilton and Juggy, giving the core boys 4 models (with plenty of facial variation) to the 2 models (distinguished only by hair, for most of them) for the core girls.
Probably so. When I read them, I don’t think that there WERE any black characters.
There aren’t that many now, either. Chuck (introduced in 1974), his girlfriend Nancy (1976) and his father, Coach Clayton (no idea when he first showed)…I assume Chuck’s mother and Nancy’s parents have appeared, but those 3 are the only major black characters.
Mad Comic’s parody of Archie back in the 50s: someone asked Archie why he was crazy about Betty and not Veronica and he said, in essence, “Can’t you see they look totally different?” Meanwhile, the artist (Bill Elder?) had drawn the two of them in exactly the same position; the only difference was the color of their hair.
And if you think Betty and Veronica look the same, you should take a look at Terry and the Pirates toward the end of George Wunder’s work with it. Every character – male or female – had exactly the same face.
They are very far from the only ones and Perez it seems to depend on what day you catch him (you can’t draw a picture with two hundred characters in it and not have some characters come out similar). And I wouldn’t call it a “trend” since it’s been a standard of comic artists going back as long as there have been comics.
IIRC, Betty had a bigger pair that Veronica.
Yeah, but they aren’t real.
What the preceding posters may consider to be a lack of complexity to the visual layer in Archie existence is far from it. I have shown in my earlier studies how figure-view consciousness in Archie comic’s inter-subjectivity mirrors the core experience of Jughead’s Urweltanschauung, and becomes submerged in the teleological mire of Betty-Veronica animus interchangeability.
If you had considered this at all (or read my undergraduate thesis), you would have seen the pointlessness in protesting these ultimately elusive digressions.
Wendy Pini.
Overall, though, it’s really difficult to draw people who don’t exist from any angle and still show the differences in some slight curves here and there, without any particular shading, nor time in which to work, and without it coming out like a caricature. You can’t blame the artists all that much.
I thought the basic joke of the Archie comics was that Betty and Veronica were identical, except for the hair, and Archie bounces back and forth between them.
<SLAPS guizot with a Wet Trout>
Untrue! Archie, Betty and Veronica have had cameos in Jaime’s world of Hoppers 13.
At a wrestling match Archie played the junior wrestling promoter trying to keep our heroes out of the backstage. He gets pushed around.
In another scene both Betty and Veronica appear in Hoppers (a barrio in LA, for the unenlightened) and are scared as hell to be there.
While they look alike, their personalities are very different.