This is "A Wall Between Us," where I spotlight notable examples of comic books breaking the fourth wall. What I'm looking at here is mostly examples from characters other than She-Hulk, Deadpool, Ambush Bug, etc. You know, the kind of stuff that is a bit more of a surprise to the reader. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!

Today, we take a look at the time that Archie and the gang celebrated the 400th issue of Pep Comics by visiting the Archie Comics' offices in Mamaroneck, NY!

One of the interesting bits of comic book history is that the early days of comic books were all about anthologies. It was extremely rare for a comic book character to debut with their own comic book series, since comic books had so many pages back then that it was a massive undertaking to have a whole comic book devoted to just one character. Just think about it logically, if you are just debuting a brand-new character, how confident are you that the character will be a hit? Could you possibly be confident enough to pay out for 60+ pages of comic book stories about that character when no one has ever heard of them? In the early days of the Golden Age, Captain America was one of the very few characters ever to launch with their own solo series. Because of this fact, there were a number of comic book series with rather generic anthology names that became a part of comic book history due to a single feature within the anthology. Comics like Action Comics and Detective Comics are now synonymous with the famous features that debuted in them (Congo Bill and Batman, respectively), with the actual titles of the comics losing all real distinctive meaning.

The problem with that is that, after a number of decades, comic book companies found themselves publishing titles that really had no reason to still be published except for nostalgia. That was the case with DC and Adventure Comics, which ended in 1983, and Archie Comics with Pep Comics, which ended in 1987. Archie Andrews debuted in Pep Comics #22, which was, at the time, a superhero anthology series. Archie would eventually become popular enough to get his own series, while maintaining his back-up feature in Pep (things became awkward when Archie began to share the covers with the superhero characters), until Pep became another Archie comic book title entirely (and the whole company changed its name from MLJ to Archie Comics).

While Pep ended with issue #411, it at least got to become the first Archie Comics series to reach the milestone 400th issue, which it achieved in 1985, a celebration that was commemorated by Archie and the gang going to visit the Archie Comics' offices in Mamaroneck (just one town over from where I grew up in New Rochelle, NY).

One of the keys to the Archie style of storytelling is that there were so many stories in any given Archie comic that writers had a great deal of freedom, as if an idea didn't work, you would have four more stories the next issue to forget about it. In an environment like that, it naturally led to a lot of fourth wall breaking and in fact, just four years earlier, Archie #300 was all about breaking the fourth wall, with the comic creators trying to keep their big 300th issue celebration a secret from their star character.

That issue was written by Frank Doyle, the most prolific Archie Comics writer of all-time (and likely one of the most prolific comic book writers of all-time period), and Doyle was behind the script for Pep Comics #400, as well, working with Dan DeCarlo, the popular humor artist whose work became the definitive "Archie style" after he went to work for the company full-time in the 1960s.

DeCarlo was inked by his son, Jim, in the issue (which was colored by Barry Grossman and lettered by Bill Yoshida), which detailed what happened when Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and Reggie go to visit Victor Gorelick, the editor of the series (who would go on to become Archie Comics' longtime Editor-in-Chief before he tragically passed away earlier this year). I believe the woman letting them in, Lisa, is the granddaughter of Archie Comics co-founder (and longtime Publisher), John Goldwater.

Goldwater had just retired a couple of years earlier, and the company was being run by Goldwater's son, Richard (Richard's younger brother, John, is the current Publisher) and Michael Silberkleit (son of Louis Silberkleit, one of the other Archie Comics co-founder. Along with Maurice Coyne, he and John Goldwater were the M, the L and the J of MLJ).

The comic is filled with good-natured in-jokes about the various writers and artists (and other employees) at Archie Comics. DeCarlo is depicted as a golf-obsessed oddball...

While a series of the older writers who had moved to Florida from New York (including Doyle, Samm Schwartz, Bob Bolling and Al Hartley) arrived at the event as the "Florida contingent." Schwartz also has a recurring gag where he stares fondly at a poster of Jughead, a reference to the fact that Schwartz was the artist most associated with Jughead comics. Another in-joke is that the employees routinely say nice things about Archie's then-sponsors, like Radio Shack computers.

An amusing regular bit in the various instances of Archie and the gang meeting their real life creators (like the time that they met the people behind the Archie cartoon) is that there is some slight antagonism between the fictional characters and their real life creators. After all, if you really met Reggie Mantle out in the world, it wouldn't be fun, no?

In the end, the decision to celebrate Pep Comics #400 is to have all of the employees and the fictional characters get together for one giant "family" photo...

It's an adorable conclusion to an enjoyable celebration of all of the great people who worked at Archie Comics over the years. Sadly, so many of them are lost to us today, but at least they would be happy to know that the company is in really nice hands with the current generations of editors, writers and artists.

Okay, I KNOW that you folks have some other good suggestions for A Wall Between Us, so drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!