What if "The Archies" were black?

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Archie with an all-black cast, “Fast Willie Jackson” was pretty 70s. It had the same goofy humor and good-natured characters that you’d find in an Archie book, but set in the inner city (MoCity to be specific), rather than middle class suburbia, and drawing from popular trends among the African-American youth of the period. The covers of the first several issues had Fast Willie (or DeeDee) asking a nondescript Caucasian guy or girl (who aren’t characters anywhere else in the book) “Can you dig it?”, to which the white kid replies “Yeah, I can dig it!”

The art and feel of the comics is very reminiscent of the Archie comic series of the 1970’s. Ironically, there is a connection to the popular Archie series (featuring characters like Betty, Veronica, Reggie and Jughead) that most people are familiar with. Can you guess what that connection is?

My interest in black history was sparked as a child when I read a collection of Golden Legacy comics. Golden Legacy was the umbrella title for a line of educational black history comic books published by Fitzgerald Publishing Co. from 1966 to 1976. Golden Legacy published comic book biographies of such notable figures as Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker and Matthew Henson.

After acquiring corporate sponsorship from Coca-Cola Company and a number of other prominent corporations, Golden Legacy published a total of nine million copies of its 16 32-page full-color volumes, distributing many of them to schools, libraries, churches, and civil rights organizations.

I would LOVE to see a reboot of this series. Maybe if I wish real hard it will happen?

The art on Fast Willie was by an Archie alum, Gus Lemoine, who some sources, such as Don Markstein’s Toonpedia, claim to be a pseudonym.