'One day I came in with a new hairdo with a little bow in my hair, and he said, 'That's it!' ' 'The hairdo came after,' Josie DeCarlo said. 'We went on a Caribbean cruise, and I had a costume for the cruise, and that's the way it started,' Josie DeCarlo said about her cat suit, immortalized by the animated cartoon's bubble-gum theme song, 'Josie and the Pussycats/Long tails and ears for hats.' The ever-stylish Josie DeCarlo was the inspiration for the leader of the Pussycats. Right away, we knew that we were meant for each other.' Instead of just using words, he would use cartoons to express himself. 'He would draw things for me to make me understand what he had in mind. 'We communicated with drawing, ' his wife said. He met his wife, Josie Dumont, a French citizen, in Belgium shortly after the Battle of the Bulge. DeCarlo was born in New Rochelle and attended New Rochelle High School and the Art Students League for three years before he was drafted into the Army in 1941 he worked as a draftsman and had a sideline, painting company mascots on the noses of airplanes. DeCarlo gave the blond Betty Cooper her distinctive ponytail and kept up with what teenagers were wearing, from miniskirts and Nehru jackets in the 1960s to baby T-shirts and cargo pants in the '90s.

'When he went to Archie, he was drawing teenagers, so he changed his style a bit, but he always had curve.' 'It was the time of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, so he was drawing that voluptuous type of woman,' Josie DeCarlo said. In 1946 he worked for Timely Comics (later Marvel Comics) on cheesecake titles like 'Millie the Model' and 'My Friend Irma,' and free-lanced for the Saturday Evening Post, Argosy and Humorama. 'He was always interested in drawing shapely girls,' Josie DeCarlo said.

DeCarlo was renowned for his curvaceous depiction of the female form, so-called 'good girl' art, which had its origins in the pinup style of World War II. DeCarlo brought his own distinctive, clean-lined cartoon style, which was soon adopted as the house style for the characters, especially the leggy females with wide eyes and snub noses. The Archie cast was a combination of real people that Montana remembered from his high school years in Haverhill, Mass., and the idealized small-town America of the Andy Hardy movies. Archie made his first appearance as a gap-toothed, bow-tie-clad teenager in loud checked trousers in Pep Comics in 1941. DeCarlo defined the look of the prototypical American teenagers Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and their friends at Riverdale High after taking over as chief artist at the comic-book company in 1975, when the characters' creator, Bob Montana, died. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Josie.

Dan artist archie comics