The Dan Decarlo sketchbook
A couple items found in the "Dan Decarlo Sketchbook" selection in the 2000 Comics Journal interview with Dan Decarlo long confounded me. You see one pencilled sketch which took up two pages in the magazine, a notation "rejected -- too sexy". What -- more precisely -- was the proposal and what precisely is being rejected? I hardly think Archie Comics was going to drag their feet on a bikini clad Betty and Veronica. Maybe they would want him to flesh out the design on the swimsuits, perhaps size it up a tad -- and I guess I have cut off Betty's big butt here, but beyond that this is just awaiting a perfunctory punchline of some sort and it is par for the course. Did Decarlo have one at the ready? The pencilled draft on the right, meantime -- marked as "possible pin up", just sits there as such. You can find the characters "bumping" through the disco era, so where is this one going? I suppose Bughead believers would be happy to see that he was aiming to do a "Jug and Betty" one.
