Jasmine Aguilera

So this whole new class of almost adults started to spark up.

And those almost adults were a big portion of the population.

And so marketing started to pay attention.

Hey, wait a minute.

And so what followed after that was this new awareness of this demographic that hadn't existed before, which was teenagers.

And Archie was kind of buffoonish teenage antics.

What's really interesting about very early Archies is Betty is just kind of there to be the person who's in love with Archie and doesn't have any kind of extra character design.

Veronica comes on the scene a couple months later, and she's supposed to be the antagonist.

She's a source of conflict.

She's the symbol of a dying debutante culture from the Gilded Age that came to small-town America.

Not only was it one of the first comics that had women, but women actually doing things.

Let's reuse old storylines.

Very easy to just repurpose old storylines from Archie and Jughead and repurpose them for Betty and Veronica.

This went to the Senate.

This was a Senate hearing.

I mean, that's not that crazy anymore.

And the Comics Code Authority would label specific comics with a specific label that would appear in the corner.

Not that Archie comics were particularly risque or violent in any way, but the artists were asked to raise necklines.

Betty and Veronica suddenly lost a whole bunch of agency that they had in the 40s.

And in the 50s, suddenly they only wanted to cook.