Tom Moore, one of the artists for the Archie comic books, died Monday morning at the age of 86. Moore, a native of El Paso in Texas, got his start in cartooning during the Korean War while he was serving in the Navy, drawing for military publications. He later studied under Burne Hogarth and others at the Cartoonist and Illustrator School in New York and soon got part-time work, like many students there, assisting artist Tom Gill who also taught at the school.
Before long, Moore got a job drawing Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and the rest of the gang. That was in 1953 and he drew them, with occasional time away, until the late eighties. A lot of his early work for the company was on Archie's Joke Book, where he wrote gags as well as illustrating them. He continued assisting Gill and working occasionally for other companies (he reportedly did some Mutt & Jeff comics for Western Publishing in the late fifties) but Archie was his main account. He also for a time worked on the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith newspaper strip.
Archie fans loved Moore's renditions of the characters and mourn his loss. So do his many students in El Paso, where he had been teaching art in recent years. He was quite the cartoonist.