According to the introduction in "The Best of Archie", the idea for Little Archie came about during a poker game. John Goldwater was playing cards with some of the other comic book publishers one night and they began to kid him about his Archie comics. They told him: "Here we publish all types of comic books and you make an empire just out of Archie. All your books are Archie this or Archie that or Big Archie or Little Archie..." That was all the inspiration Goldwater needed and he added Little Archie in 1956. Bob Bolling was selected to write and draw the new strip, which introduced new plots and characters to the Archie legend by concentrating on the adventures of the gang during their early elementary school days. Bolling's stories were consistently written and drawn with a sensitivity