Early life and career
John L. Goldwater was born in East Harlem, New York on February 14, 1916. "His mother died giving birth to him... and his father succumbed to grief, abandoning his baby and dying soon afterward," leaving the orphaned John to be raised by a foster mother. Distantly related to US Senator Barry M. Goldwater, in his youth, the teenage Goldwater hitchhiked his way west during the Depression, leaving "New York, hopping freight trains and bumming rides to the Midwest, where he worked for a time in Kansas as a news reporter. Assigned to school sports, he hung around with football teams, meeting the players and the girls they attracted, who would later supply him with ample comic material." A few years later, "he continued west to the Grand Canyon, where he worked at a lodge," from which he was dismissed for "socializing with the female help," his employers paid for him to travel to San Francisco, where he saved enough money (again working as a reporter) to travel by ship back to New York. On the boat, "he met two young women bound for the novitiate... [b]oth fell for him, which later gave him the idea of the Betty-Veronica rivalry."
Married twice, Goldwater's second wife Gloria was the first "national chairwoman" of the women's division of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, while Goldwater was himself a national commissioner of the same organisation.
MLJ Comics
Arriving back in New York, he gained employment at the docks, where his "experience with shipping" inspired him to both start his own company - Periodicals for Export, Inc. - and strike a deal with pulp/magazine publisher Louis Silberkleit to "buy his outdated issues at a penny each," which he then re-sold abroad. Finding success in his venture, Goldwater was soon joined by Silberkleit and Maurice Coyne to form their own publishing venture
MLJ Comics, (named after the first initial of each of the three individuals).
Silberkleit and Coyne, with (Timely/Marvel's) Martin Goodman, were among the earliest publishers of pulp magazines with their Columbia Publications publishing house, and others. In addition to having bought stock from them for his "Periodicals for Export" venture, Goldwater worked alongside the two of them for Paul Sampliner, Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld's Independent News - the distribution arm of National Periodicals, forerunner of DC Comics.
Inspired by the success of National's Superman and Batman (and hot on the heels of Goodman's Timely Comics publications), Goldwater and company published their first comic -
Blue Ribbon Comics #1 - in November 1939", and soonafter, in his role as editor, Goldwater helped devise the Shield as star of
Pep Comics, the Black Hood for
Top-Notch Comics, and Steel Sterling in
Zip Comics."
Interviewed for the book
The Best of Archie (1980), Goldwater recalls that he "thought of Superman as an abnormal individual and concluded that the antithesis, a normal person, could be just as popular," so "in 1941, just as the war was restricting paper supplies," the fledgling company began publishing such a character in the pages of
Pep Comics #22: Archie Andrews.
Archie Comics
In 1941, Goldwater, "inspired by the popular 'Andy Hardy' movies starring Mickey Rooney"
Calling the character [[Archie Andrews|Archie]], the name echoing that of a schoolfriend, Goldwater - and series writer/artist [[Bob Montana]] with the surrounding cast supposedly "patterned after teen-agers he [Goldwater] had met in the Midwest."
Success
The success of the Archie line of comics, thought Goldwater, was because
At its peak, the Archie [[comic strip]] ran in 750 newspapers, while comics sales continue to sell millions of copies each year (from a height of c. 50 million) through grocery stores and newsvenders as well as tailored comics shops - Archie Comics' output is among the few still carried by the full range of venues.
The Archie line of comics (and related items) gave Goldwater a "multimillion-dollar fortune and publishing empire, Archie Comic Publications Inc. of Mamoroneck, N.Y.," a major rival to the comics industry's Superhero houses Marvel and DC Comics. Archie would feature not just in comic books and newspaper strips, but on radio, television and in film, as well as having his own "short-lived chain of Archie restaurants."
Goldwater ran Archie Comics until his retirement in 1983.