Frank Doyle

Who is Frank Doyle?

Frank Doyle was the head writer for Archie Comics for over thirty years. He wrote over 10,000 stories featuring the Archie characters. Artist Dan DeCarlo referred to Doyle as "the best".

Doyle, one of several Archie contributors who studied art at the Pratt Institute, was originally a penciller for Fiction House comics, working on such titles as Planet Stories. After he was let go from Fiction House, he decided that he was better suited to writing stories: "It was easier," he said. "My mind worked better that way." In 1951 he joined Archie Comics as a writer. Though he no longer drew stories himself, he continued to write in storyboard form, using a desk that used to belong to Fiction House artist Fran Hopper.

By the end of the '50s, Doyle was writing the majority of stories for such important Archie titles as Archie and Betty and Veronica; DeCarlo said that when he joined Archie Comics, most of the scripts he was given were written by Doyle. In the mid-'60s, he also began writing many of the stories for adventure-themed titles like Life With Archie; he wrote all the stories featuring the Archie characters' superhero alter-egoes such as Pureheart the Powerful.