MLJ (Archie) Comics
Moving to New York, he attended the Art Students League and the Phoenix Art Institute. While freelancing at True and Fox Comics, Montana created an adventure strip about four teenage boys and tried to sell it without success. Then he started working for MLJ comics where later he was asked to work up a high school style comic strip story. At the age of 21, he created Archie, drawn from his own high school experiences. Harry Shorten, the editor of MLJ. helped by teaching him how to write a good comic dialogue. The success of the character in MLJ's Pep Comics (December, 1941) led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (November, 1942).
Living at the apartment on 24th street in NYC with his mother and sister Ruth, Montana was soon drawing the Archie comic strip, doing both the daily and Sunday strip which over the next 35 years was running in over 750 newspapers.
Read more about this topic: Bob Montana