(CNN) -- If a fellow is going to spend 55 years working in the same place, he would be wise to count his blessings that the place is Riverdale. 

"The first day I walked in, in 1958, I was 17 years old," said Victor Gorelick. "I took a job as a fill-in art assistant." 

He never went on to college. He never took another job. Today he is 72. His explanation for staying is so basic he can express it in a single sentence: 

"I decided to stick with Archie." 

And Betty. And Veronica. And Jughead. And Reggie. And, most of all, Riverdale, U.S.A. 

It doesn't exist, of course, which is probably what makes the town so perfect. Nothing in real life could match it. Archie Andrews first appeared in a comic book in 1941, and that idealized town in which he and his friends have always lived has never been identified by state. Some readers assume it is in the Midwest, but Gorelick -- the longest-serving employee of Archie Comics, and now its editor-in-chief -- will go no further than to say that "it's in a place that has four seasons." 

The summer, autumn, winter and spring in the pages of the comic books have never been the same seasons that Gorelick has observed outside the windows of the Archie offices in Westchester County, New York: "We have a four-month lead time. So the season an artist is drawing on a given day is not the same season we're living in actual life." 
When did Archie Anrdrews first appear?
1941