Little Audrey must have been popular to warrant 2 consecutive titles published in 1967. Playful Little Audrey #70 only features skateboarding on the cover, but Little Audrey and Melvin #33 has a skateboard storyline as well. Melvin looks like a twerp.

Out of my OCD/ADD is born the glory of the Skateboarding in Comic Books gallery. While staring at the large box of comic books I’ve been scanning in preparation for posts, I started having a hard time remembering which ones I had posted already. I also ended up buying a duplicate of a title that already owned. I needed to fix that. You are welcome. Enjoy.

I lurk on the web site Action Transfers web site on a recurring basis ever couple of years, mostly waiting for them to post the Battle of Midway set I had as a kid. Action Transfers was the brand name for the dry-rub decals made by the Letraset company. Aside from making the lettering that 80’s zine makers (and graphic designers, I presume) loved so much, they also made sets containing illustrations you could place on the provided scenery. This is essentially Colorform sets that were permanent once applied. Sure, you could do that with stickers too, but this method somehow seemed more glamorous. What you are looking at above, however, is a plain old iron on t-shirt transfer. It turns out “Action Transfers” occasionally produced t-shirt transfers as well, and why not? It was originally all screen printed. These two skateboard designs are among the few documented shirt transfers on the Action transfers site.

This is Laugh comics #16 from the second Laugh series that ran between 1987-1991. It looks to be a bit of a sendup on the movie 9-5 but that was released in 1980 and the publication date of Laugh #16 is 1989. I suppose that movie could have been lingering in the pop culture zeitgeist almost a decade later. Then again, Archie comics aren’t really known for originality and they frequently re-use story lines. Everyone looks like a super 80’s yuppy in this flying jet powered skateboard story titled “Working Lass” and inexplicably does not take place in the future. Let’s read on and discover the answer to the age old question: What if Pop’s Pizza and Jet Skateboards were involved in a corporate merger?

Pep #331 (November 1977) features a one page story with Archie skateboarding titled “Tide Ride,” as well as a Youth Opportunity Sales Club ad in which you can earn a skateboard by selling 16 boxes of greeting cards.

This is issue #48 of Reggie’s Wise Guy Jokes, published in January of 1979 by the Archie Comics Group. It’s got skateboarding on the cover as well as two single page stories that feature skateboarding, including what just might be the first ever guitar-as-skateboard!

Bugs Bunny #213 is from October, 1979. It was published by Western Publishing under the Gold Key and Whitman labels, the former in newsstands and the latter in poly bags for stores. A disapproving Elmer Fudd looks on as Bugs prepares to go into a double-truck carve grind in the pool he must have drained. That wascally rabbit… There are no other skateboard illustrations in this issue except for the one in an Olympic Sales Club ad that features a California Free Former plastic skateboard.

It’s 1965, a time when seeing your friend on a skateboard is still so exciting that it would make you run after him on the street. This is #43 of the Life With Archie series that started in 1958. November, 1965 was a big month for skateboarding in the Archie Comics Group. There was skateboarding on the cover of Jughead #136 and a cover with a story in Tippy Teen #1, a title drawn by the recently defected former Archie artist Samm Schwartz. Sam is credited with developing the Jughead character into a headliner instead of just a bit character.

Cheryl Blossom #26 was published in 1997 by the Archie Comics group. I figured this would be cheap enough to pick up being it’s relatively new-ish and this era of Archie… who still reads them? Turns out the going price for this is about $30 when they are available. Apparently this issue had shorter print run than the others, go figure. Fortunately the digital version is available for $2. This issue features a story called Skateboarding’ Blossom.

The Real Ghostbusters in this context refers to the UK based Marvel comic series that ran from 1988-1992 for 193 issues. Issue #53 dates to 1989 and features I was going to try and buy one cheaply but I managed to find the entire issue online at a sketchy website that threw up some security warnings so I won’t post the link here. There is no real additional skateboard art other than the cover because the story is a written one that appears in a feature called “Winston’s Journal,” which is kind of a bummer, but’s a cheap way to fill pages. Check out the cover, and the story, plus a bonus shot of a crab on a skateboard from an advertisement for Tom & Jerry comic book in the same issue. And for the heck of it, a bunch of Ghostbusters skateboards from the late 80’s to present day. – Thanks to David Maes for the tip