“America’s typical teen-ager.” That’s the slogan that originally marketed Archie Andrews and his Riverdale gang to some of the comic series’ earliest readers. As film critic and scholar Gerald Peary pointed out in a lecture and screening on Wednesday, the “Archie” comics are singlehandedly the most successful non-superhero series available, focusing instead on the idyllic hometown life shared among attractive and squeaky-clean “friendly anti-intellectuals.”

Peary, who wrote film reviews for the Boston Phoenix from 1996 until the paper folded in 2012, has had a lifelong love of Archie comics, having first read them as a child in West Virginia. In his visit to campus, he screened his most recent documentary, “Archie’s Betty: An Independent Documentary Search for the Real-Life Characters Behind Archie Comics,” which examines the series’ roots in reality.

“This is a detective search,” Peary told the audience prior to the screening. “When I was a kid, everyone read comic books like crazy, and my very very favorite, as you can see, was Archie Comics.”

Prof. Thomas Doherty, the American Studies Department chair, introduced Peary, explaining how the critic’s earlier work draws upon an “inexhaustible supply of background interviewing with what seemed like every important actor and director of the 20th century.”

“I knew Gerry as a byline before I knew him as a human,” he added.

Peary’s work in journalism led him to a pivotal moment in 1988, when he published an article in the Boston Globe that began what would become a 28-year search for the real-life individuals behind the characters. At the time of the article’s publication, Peary was under the impression that the characters — including their personalities and likenesses — derived from Archie creator and artist Bob Montana’s high school classmates from his time spent in Haverhill, Mass. As Peary explained in the documentary, the conclusion certainly made sense at the time: thick-necked Arnold Daggett was a spitting image of quarterback Moose Mason, girl-next-door Elizabeth Walker Bostwick echoed love interest Betty Cooper and class-clown Buddy Heffernan’s hijinks seemed to have inspired Archie Andrews.

But Montana, who died of a heart attack in 1975, never said much on the inspirations for his characters, while several others claimed to have played a role in Archie’s inception. Most notably, former Archie Comics CEO John L. Goldwater claimed to have developed the character of Archie as a sort of Andy Hardy, idealized teenager alternative.

Still, as Peary noted in the documentary, early Archie comics seem to derive a great deal from Montana’s Haverhill upbringing; in particular, the names of Archie’s classmates and teachers mirror Montana’s, while the statue of “The Thinker” outside Riverdale High is nearly identical to the one that still stands outside Haverhill High School today.

In 2010, Peary was contacted by comic superfan Shaun Clancy, who pointed out shortcomings in Peary’s 1988 article. Specifically, Clancy noted that while some of Peary’s conclusions were correct, many of the characters were, in fact, a blend of inspirations from Montana, Goldwater and other writers and editors who played a role in the comic’s development. However, the identity of the real Betty still remained unclear.

Peary partnered with Clancy to figure out Betty’s inspiration, and throughout the search, the two uncovered Betty Tokar Jankovich, a 95 year-old Czech immigrant who had had a relationship with Montana nearly 70 years ago and who seemed the perfect fit for Betty Cooper.

Yet even with the mystery of Betty seemingly solved, the series as a whole still has great cultural significance, Peary explained in a question-and-answer session after the screening.

“It is weirdly popular, because it is a global comic book. Just like some Hollywood movies do okay in America but are huge in China, ... Archie is like that,” he said, noting that there is huge interest in India, Pakistan, Latin American countries and Nigeria.

Peary also pointed out that the Archie demographic overlaps with what he called the “Hillary Clinton” demographic — “that is, women fifty and over,” he said — “because women of a certain age were obsessed with this comic book, and this thing of whether you were Veronica [Lodge (Betty’s rival for Archie’s romantic interest)] or Betty obsessed young girls.”

Peary currently teaches film studies at Suffolk University in Boston and also serves as the curator and programmer for the Boston University cinematheque. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.