Comic book fanatics are used to seeking out holy grails, which usually involves completing holes in their collections. The journalist and documentarian Gerald Peary took his quest a bit further: As a passionate fan of Archie Andrews, he set out to find the real-life inspirations behind the gang from Riverdale. The end result is “Archie’s Betty,” a documentary that will be shown on Oct. 4 as part of the New Jersey Film Festival at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

“I was definitely a Betty guy as a child and a Betty guy as an adult,” Mr. Peary says in the film. So it seemed only fitting that he and his chief researcher, Shaun Clancy, discovered the flesh-and-blood model for Betty Cooper, who, along with Jughead Jones and Archie, was introduced to readers in 1941 as part of Pep Comics, written by Vic Bloom and drawn by Bob Montana. Betty’s eponym is Betty Tokar Jankovich, a former girlfriend of Mr. Montana and a current resident of Edison, who will be attending the screening.

Ms. Jankovich is tickled by the attention (“To have all this publicity at the age of 94, it is ironic, isn’t it?”) and had no idea of the role she played in Americana until Mr. Clancy found her. “It’s wonderful the way it developed,” she said during a recent telephone interview.

Image Betty Cooper Credit... Archie Comics

Her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Perth Amboy in 1929, when she was 8. A decade later, she and her sister, Helen, would commute to Lower Manhattan to work in the cafeteria at the Western Union Building. The same building housed M.L.J. Comics, the forerunner to Archie Comic Publications. In the lobby, the sisters met Mr. Montana and his best friend, Harry Lucey, another illustrator, who invited them out. “We work in the same building and you’re very nice-looking men, so why not?” Ms. Jankovich recalled.