This is Richie Rich #163 published in February of 1978 by Harvey Publications. As a child, I never understood the appeal of Richie Rich. Why would anyone want to read about a kid who was absurdly rich unless he was also Batman? In 1978, Richie is on the forefront of the novelty skateboard trend with this dollar sign shaped deck. He’s got bling too – that looks like some sort of gem covered mounting hardware. “With a model like this, I’ll never be skate-bored!” Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…
Here’s the cover. The Great Skateboard Adventure — It’s the greatest!
Richie skates with his pals Freckles and Peewee. I think they both escaped from a carnival sideshow. Richie’s and crew prepare for the skateboard contest on his inexplicably wavy sidewalk while two suspicious men approach on a “quiet” motorcycle.
Richie pursues the crooks on his trusty scooter (not shown) until the bad guys run over his machine. He retires to the Batcave garage to install some diamond bearings. Sure, that sounds absurd, but so would the idea of $150 ceramic bearings back in 1978.
After a little equipment upgrade, Richie reluctantly agrees to try out his new setup, even though he’s not in the mood to skateboard with crooks loose on the estate.
The crooks do indeed show up, so Richie chases them on his skateboard.
Richie avoids a road hazard through the use of the “tail-wheelie.” Meanwhile, instead of just leaving, the crooks feel compelled to keep getting off the motorcycle to set up traps.
Richie pulls off an impressive wall ride over the deathbox, followed by some sort of inverse hippie jump.
Here’s proof that bombing a hill on a skateboard is safer than riding a motorcycle. Not only did Richie foil the thieves, he also won the skateboard contest (that he missed) do to the sheer radness of his fancy riding.
10 comments
Mark
I Google Richie Rich quiet motorcycle and found this page. I had this issue of RR, and as an avid emtb, this episode of RR came to mind.
Mike
Hehe this is presheckler
RJ
Found myself reading the whole thing for some reason. Maybe it’s the fact that even the richest kid in the world still puts his own set up together. That’s the moral right? Nobody is better than skateboarding, it’s the great equalizer.
RH
Hm, I got that, if you practice your skateboarding, you might get as “fancy” as Richie Rich. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that….) Did look like he was about to beat Gelfan/Mullen to the ollie – which would have had to have been called the richie – until the writer had a failure of imagination, and moved the log some… and yet a few frames later he invented the wallride, though it seems like those’d be unimaginably difficult without ollie-ing.
RH
Upon further review, that almost passes for the invention of the flatground ollie, and it was not the writer or the artist who screwt the log over, but rather, the colorist.
Pat
I genuinely enjoyed that.
Jerry
How do you feel about Scrooge McDuck?
RH
Don’t know about Kilwag, but as primarily surfers at the time, my brothers and I enjoyed looking back at Scrooge’s nephews’ mention of the island nation of Ripan Taro. (I don’t exactly remember, but Scrooge may have bought it for them.) Only other thing that stuck with us from my brother’s rag-tag collection was Archie or Jughead’s “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers is….” Oh, and a crime magazine that he had picked up in the course of buying comics that had a really weird “inside story” about the workers/slaves at Disneyland… that, who knows, may have even been the genesis, years later, of the Vandals song “Pirate’s Life”.
RH
Huh, hadn’t even read Kilwag’s Box-O-Car quote about Summer, in the Robot on a Plate entry right before this’n… anyone got a goofy pop culture reference in this very same cadence, for Fall… and/or one for Winter… to consolidate this collection? No doubt it would make Randy, to quote the GEICO commercial, happier than Neil with an eBay deck… and would rival the “Amazing P.O.S.” of yore, when it comes to peripheral nonsense.
David ODK
The Notorious B.I.G. must have read it, he sings ‘Richer than Richie’ in Hypnotize and he probably liked the diamond bearings a lot …