R.I.P., Long-time Archie EiC, Victor Gorelick

nweathington

Gorelick started working for Archie at the age of 16 in their corrections department, eventually working his way up to editor-in-chief. It added up to a 62-year career with the publisher. While I only talked with Victor briefly on a couple of occasions, my buddy Jim Amash (an inker for Archie since the mid-’90s) knew him very well. I think it's safe to say that Victor was a huge part of why Archie has remained relevant in pop culture the past 40 years.

nweathington

And for anyone wondering, it’s pronounced gor-EL-ick.

mwhitt80

I love hearing stories about Archie. You never see brief stints at Archie; it seems like tenure there is measured in decades not months or years.

nweathington

mwhitt80 said:

I love hearing stories about Archie. You never see brief stints at Archie; it seems like tenure there is measured in decades not months or years.

Whenever Gorelick (and presumably the editors before him) found people he could rely on, he did his best to keep them around, making sure they always stayed busy. That changed somewhat over the past five or six years or so, once Archie started printing less original material and started relying more and more on reprints, but that decision wasn’t Gorelick’s to make.

mwhitt80

@nweathington has alter ego done an Archie issue? I can't remember one, but that just means my.memory is going to crap

nweathington

Not a full-blown Archie issue, per se, but it’s covered various periods. There have been issues covering MLJ (pre-Archie), the Mighty Crusaders line of the ’60s, and things of that nature, but Roy doesn’t often cover humor comics, and when he does it’s usually in a tangential way.

Besides which, Archie ownership can get pretty touchy about larger-scale projects like that. It’s much simpler to keep it to an article here, an interview there.

mwhitt80

Ohh yeah, I read a few mighty crusaders articles in alter ego, and forgot about them. Thank you for the information; I'm going to go pull up my digital copies and reread them.

@nweathington

mwhitt80

I don't know if you saw but word balloon reposted a 2018 interview with Victor Gorelick. I forgot all about it.

He worked for Archie from before the first cartoon up to getting deals done for Sabrina to become a Netflix series.