It’s rare to find an Archie Comics Group story with skateboarding that doesn’t focus on Archie, Jughead, or poor Mr Weatherby. Laugh comics #309, published in December of 1976, has a story with a character named Li’l Jinx titled “The Board Game.” The comics seems to be aimed mostly at teens, but they have a small stable of characters made up of little kids as well.

My first skateboard was a yellow plastic rRoller Derby banana board bought from a Sears catalog outlet in Midland, Michigan. I was in grade school in the 70’s, and soon after, all my neighborhood friends had skateboards, including Gene & Gary Wang, who lived across the street, as well as a kid names Allan Lockwood (I think?) For a while my driveway had intricate slalom courses drawn in chalk, complete with tank installations and pill boxes, firing at us of course. What can I say, I was a prepubescent male. When the driveway became too confining, we developed a sort of Rollerball-lite game that involved pairing up into teams made up of one kid on a bicycle towing another kid on a skateboard behind some jumprope tied to the back seat of the bike. The objective was to circle the block, trying to make the other team wipe out. It was great fun until I sent a skateboard flying at Alan, who got his glove caught on the back of his tow bike and wad dragged on his rear end for 20 feet before he came loose. He had a giant friction burn on the side of his ass and hip that hurt like the devil, and that was the end of the public enthusiasm for bicycle skateboard chariot races. If we had had these bespoke skateboard tow ropes we probably would have felt like gladiators and might have kept at it. The packaging makes some dubious claims: “Control your speed – Makes skateboarding safer!”

– Thanks to Terence Sideras for the pic.

UPDATE: This is actually from the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.

Reggie and Me #111 came out in January of 1979 and has not one, but two skateboard storylines, although one is a short half pager. I might actually be finally starting to appreciate the Archie Comics group… I thought I was vaccinated but I guess not. There’s just so much skateboarding through the years in their titles. No other publisher has given skateboarding that much love, despite how it’s usually the same storyline. I’m surprised Reggie had his own title, he’s sort of the antagonist whenever he does make an appearance. Nobody likes Reggie.

Any time I go in to a resale or vintage store I make a beeline for the magazines and grab anything from 1965-1966 as well as the random publications from late 70’s. The very first thing I picked up at Vintage on Third in McMinnville was copy of Hot Rod Show World 1978. Despite no obvious association, something about it was calling to me. Sure enough, there was a two page spread on skateboarding, as well as a ton of hot rods and predictably, hot rod women.

Les Bidasses en Vadrouille is French movie made in 1979, and was the first of several starring the French band band Martin Circus. The title translates to “The Soldiers on the Move,”and it looks like they were “soldiers” in at least three titles. Here’s a translation of the plot synopsis:

After the big maneuvers, four young soldiers, René, Sylvain, Gérard and Alain, arrive at the end of their military service and take a two hundred kilometer ride with a latest model AM17 assault tank nicknamed “the Invincible” in order to reach their base. Forced to clean the machine, the soldiers will cause panic in a market and involuntarily commit a hold-up.

Part of this zany journey involves an extended skateboard (planche de skate) sequence.

– Thanks to Doc Skaterock for the tip

In honor of Halloween here’s a terrifying ghost named Casper. This is issue #96 of Casper’s Ghostland (and all his friends) from 1977. Harvey Comics is sort of the Hanna-Barbera of comic books, as in cheap and not very good. Casper rides a “sky board” on the cover, floating above an unnamed child on a skateboard in case you don’t get the joke. It’s good thing the motion lines and puffs are coming from his leg and not his rear end. Can ghosts fart?

Day two of 7 Days of Jughead features the story “Skateboard Fever” from issue 272 of Jughead, published in 1978. I don’ know why I didn’t go chronologically and post this one first, but I’m already posting Archie comics, so all taste and logic has gone by the wayside. This story is once again set in the hallways of Riverdale High. Poor Principal Weatherbee, or “the Bee” as Jughead refers to him, spent decades either purposefully or accidentally trying to learn how to skateboard, but he never gets the hang of it. Highlights include Veronica calling the guys “bean bags,” and Betty acting like a Karen – “It’s against the rules to skateboard in school!”

First time visitor? I’m a sucker for vintage skateboard packaging. This is a box that California Free Former model #CF-26 came in. Thanks to Andra Malczewski for the picture. That’s her and Joe Collela on the box, photographed in Redondo Beach, California. Glorious!

After decades of only ever seeing this in an advert, in 2017 I managed to score a block print (actual block) of the Wheelee Board logo from Ebay and sat on it for a long time. I think I was going to try and print something with MC but like most of my grand ideas, never got around to it. I’m not sure about the authenticity of this, becasue it wouldn’t have been used in magazine printing of the era, but who knows, maybe for stationary or handbills… That is if these things actually existed, because I’ve never known anyone who has claimed to see one. Flash forward to couple of weeks ago and someone posts images of an actual Wheelee Board!

This is not a picture of a cored wheel in the traditional sense. You’re seeing an intact wheel surrounded by a second pour of urethane at a later date. I had never seen anything like this, but apparently it was a tactic used at some point in the 70’s used to sell old stock of smaller wheels that were no longer popular. In this case an open bearing Cadillac wheel was used as the core. Most of them look like these do now, many decades later. Mr Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center?

– Thanks to Dennis Kilian, Mark Manbars Baxley and Harvey Gallent for the pics.