Another of the great artists of Archie Comics, Joe Edwards, has left us. Details are a bit sketchy but Mr. Edwards had been in poor health for some time. He died this morning at the age of 85.
Edwards was an amazingly prolific artist. After education at Rome Academy and something called the Hastings Animation School, he began drawing comic books in the late thirties, about the time the medium was first established. He worked at first for the Demby Studios shop, then did funny animals for Dell and Timely. He began working for MLJ (which was later known as Archie Comics) in 1942, initially doing several funny animal strips, including Squoimy the Woim, Cubby the Bear and Bumbie the Bee-tective. All three of these appeared as short features in the first issue of Archie Comics.
He continued to do funny animals for a time for Archie but as more and more of their line became the teen comics, his work gravitated in that direction. In 1947, he created a feature about a precocious youngster named Li'l Jinx who appeared in the company's books, primarily as a back-up feature but occasionally in her own title, well into the seventies. He reportedly drew on his own experiences as a parent when he wrote Li'l Jinx. (Jinx, like Edwards' own son, was born on Halloween.)
Li'l Jinx has sometimes been dismissed as a female rip-off of Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace by folks who are unaware that Edwards' strip predated Ketcham's by four years. On the other hand, Edwards also did another kid strip for Archie called Shrimpy that sure looks like he was instructed to ape Charles Schulz's Peanuts.
Edwards produced thousands of pages for Archie featuring the whole gang — Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, etc. — through at least 1987, usually writing, pencilling and inking the work all by himself. Most were filler gag pages because the editors there had learned that they could always count on Joe to give them something funny in a short format. His work appeared often in Archie's Joke Book, Archie's Madhouse and in pin-up gags sprinkled throughout all the company's titles.
I never met Mr. Edwards but I always enjoyed his work, especially on Li'l Jinx. If anyone reading this has any more information on the man, please let me know so I can direct people towards it.