Verónica or Veronica? Mexican-Americans in Archie Comics, Dan DeCarlo, and Mextasy-laced Befuddlements of a Teenager's Libido

Updated 4 October 2015, first published December 2014 

As I have shared before here in these 'pages,' I spent a fair amount of my time growing up in Laredo, Texas, reading comic books--specifically, a lot of Archie Comics.

Dan DeCarlo's Men's Humor Magazine
work--not for Archie Comics!

Many of my obsessions for women were probably inculcated through the india ink wonders that are the magic of Dan DeCarlo--illustrator for Archie, Jughead, Betty & Veronica, and the rest of the Riverdale gang in the Silver Age heydays of the 60s and 70s. Harry Lucey, too, illustrator for my Mextasy homage below, also takes/gets some of the blame!

Back then, though I preferred Betty (she was nicer, and, as a blonde, an exotic for this chubby Mexican-American Laredense), it was Veronica, whose affections I fantasized about. I thought she was Mexican-American, a Latina--at the very least, she sure looked like all the middle and high school girls I was surrounded by at St. Augustine High School in Laredo--those memories still hound my synapses, a Catholic-school altar boy and lecter, surrounded by unthinkably beauty.

And so it is that I dedicate this Mextasy Poster below to Harry Lucey, whose art gave flight to my fantasies, and to Dan DeCarlo, whose ink-bourn dabblings imprinted me forever (and yes, deranged my libido in ways that only Freud--channeling Cantinflas via Rosario Castellanos--could fathom). Veronica Lodge, no doubt, was not Latina, not Chicana, not Tejana--but for me, young, ardent, and filled with visions of fantasized erotic futures, it did not matter.