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Archie 75th Anniversary Celebration Digest

Started by Ottawagrant, September 23, 2016, 04:31:09 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Ottawagrant

Just was wondering if anyone else picked up the new Archie #1/75th anniversary digest? In Canada it has a cover price of $8.99, but WalMart has a great deal where you can pick up any  3 digests, regardless of price, for 10 bucks. The second story in the digest is a Frank Doyle gem "Once Upon A Tune". Very 'Mad Magazine'/'MadHouse' kind of story. Really miss that kind of thing with Archie. Starting to look like a good purchase of reprints for a year (12 issues). Would love to see them do this with other Archie books. Just a year long-12 issue digest series. With 'Laugh', 'Pep', to choose from. Wouldn't be hard. Reprints of 'Madhouse' wouldn't hurt either. Hard to say if they'd be popular today. The digest did reprint a 'Josie' story ('Headcount') that was just reprinted recently. No complaints, great story. Anyone else enjoy the issue?

irishmoxie

Don't get it unless you already have 75 years, 75 stories or Best of Archie. It's reprints of these. You would think they could find another stories....

Ottawagrant

Thanks for letting me know that. I didn't have the other books you mentioned, but glad I didn't pay a lot for it. I remember a short time ago they took some of the 400 page books & reprinted them in the 1000 page books. I usually buy the 1000 pagers, but had seen the 400's in the store. All the same stories, page for page. The plates for the comics didn't have time to cool. Now THAT is recycling! You are right, they need to dig a little deeper in the last 75 years for some different stories. I'd LOVE to see them reprint that classic story where it turns out to be Betty as a mysterious kissing bandit, who is kissing everyone. Boys & girls. Now THAT is a page turner. They could reprint any of those stories from the late 50's to late 60's for me any day.

steveinthecity

The "Kissing Bandit" story was reprinted last year in Betty & Veronica Double Digest #233.
Comics!

DeCarlo Rules

#4
Quote from: Ottawagrant on September 23, 2016, 06:45:53 PM
Thanks for letting me know that. I didn't have the other books you mentioned, but glad I didn't pay a lot for it. I remember a short time ago they took some of the 400 page books & reprinted them in the 1000 page books. I usually buy the 1000 pagers, but had seen the 400's in the store. All the same stories, page for page. The plates for the comics didn't have time to cool. Now THAT is recycling! You are right, they need to dig a little deeper in the last 75 years for some different stories. I'd LOVE to see them reprint that classic story where it turns out to be Betty as a mysterious kissing bandit, who is kissing everyone. Boys & girls. Now THAT is a page turner. They could reprint any of those stories from the late 50's to late 60's for me any day.

Let the buyer beware. ACP will print the same stories over and over again, once in the regular digests, once in the 1000-Page Comics or Giant Comics digests, and now going in the reverse direction, from the 400+ page "Best of Archie Comics" and "Archie's Favorite Comics" trade paperbacks, back to the standard digest format. There seems to be an implicit assumption that there's no overlap in consumers between the different formats, and/or that readers are too young (or too stupid) to notice or care. It's pure laziness and greed on the part of the publisher, in trying to milk every single ounce of work that comes out of the editorial and production department multiple times.

In fact, because of this latest 75th Anniversary Celebration digest scam, I am just about ready to let all my digest subscriptions run out. I will probably just continue to get the Betty and Veronica, B&V Friends, and Jughead and Archie digests by ordering them through my local comic store, and simply browsing individual issues of the remaining titles at Barnes and Noble or Walmart to see if there's anything worthwhile in them to make them worth buying.

SAGG

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on September 24, 2016, 12:54:00 AM
Quote from: Ottawagrant on September 23, 2016, 06:45:53 PM
Thanks for letting me know that. I didn't have the other books you mentioned, but glad I didn't pay a lot for it. I remember a short time ago they took some of the 400 page books & reprinted them in the 1000 page books. I usually buy the 1000 pagers, but had seen the 400's in the store. All the same stories, page for page. The plates for the comics didn't have time to cool. Now THAT is recycling! You are right, they need to dig a little deeper in the last 75 years for some different stories. I'd LOVE to see them reprint that classic story where it turns out to be Betty as a mysterious kissing bandit, who is kissing everyone. Boys & girls. Now THAT is a page turner. They could reprint any of those stories from the late 50's to late 60's for me any day.

Let the buyer beware. ACP will print the same stories over and over again, once in the regular digests, once in the 1000-Page Comics or Giant Comics digests, and now going in the reverse direction, from the 400+ page "Best of Archie Comics" and "Archie's Favorite Comics" trade paperbacks, back to the standard digest format. There seems to be an implicit assumption that there's no overlap in consumers between the different formats, and/or that readers are too young (or too stupid) to notice or care. It's pure laziness and greed on the part of the publisher, in trying to milk every single ounce of work that comes out of the editorial and production department multiple times.

In fact, because of this latest 75th Anniversary Celebration digest scam, I am just about ready to let all my digest subscriptions run out. I will probably just continue to get the Betty and Veronica, B&V Friends, and Jughead and Archie digests by ordering them through my local comic store, and simply browsing individual issues of the remaining titles at Barnes and Noble or Walmart to see if there's anything worthwhile in them to make them worth buying.

Out of curiosity DR (not that I'm disagreeing with you, which I'm not), what do you think ACP should release? Perhaps long-lost stories they haven't printed in years? Surely it seems ACP can do these? What, there are over, say 20,000 stories?

irishmoxie

Yeah it's sad because I've seen lots of posts about this digest series. It's obvious people are interested in classic Archie and old stories particularly pre 1990. Yet ACP keeps reprinting the same stories over and over and taking advantage of consumers. Dan DeCarlo and others from ACP's past would be rolling in the graves at how terrible of a 75th anniversary celebration this all is.

DeCarlo Rules

Quote from: SAGG on September 24, 2016, 04:56:20 PM
Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on September 24, 2016, 12:54:00 AM
Quote from: Ottawagrant on September 23, 2016, 06:45:53 PM
Thanks for letting me know that. I didn't have the other books you mentioned, but glad I didn't pay a lot for it. I remember a short time ago they took some of the 400 page books & reprinted them in the 1000 page books. I usually buy the 1000 pagers, but had seen the 400's in the store. All the same stories, page for page. The plates for the comics didn't have time to cool. Now THAT is recycling! You are right, they need to dig a little deeper in the last 75 years for some different stories. I'd LOVE to see them reprint that classic story where it turns out to be Betty as a mysterious kissing bandit, who is kissing everyone. Boys & girls. Now THAT is a page turner. They could reprint any of those stories from the late 50's to late 60's for me any day.

Let the buyer beware. ACP will print the same stories over and over again, once in the regular digests, once in the 1000-Page Comics or Giant Comics digests, and now going in the reverse direction, from the 400+ page "Best of Archie Comics" and "Archie's Favorite Comics" trade paperbacks, back to the standard digest format. There seems to be an implicit assumption that there's no overlap in consumers between the different formats, and/or that readers are too young (or too stupid) to notice or care. It's pure laziness and greed on the part of the publisher, in trying to milk every single ounce of work that comes out of the editorial and production department multiple times.

In fact, because of this latest 75th Anniversary Celebration digest scam, I am just about ready to let all my digest subscriptions run out. I will probably just continue to get the Betty and Veronica, B&V Friends, and Jughead and Archie digests by ordering them through my local comic store, and simply browsing individual issues of the remaining titles at Barnes and Noble or Walmart to see if there's anything worthwhile in them to make them worth buying.

Out of curiosity DR (not that I'm disagreeing with you, which I'm not), what do you think ACP should release? Perhaps long-lost stories they haven't printed in years? Surely it seems ACP can do these? What, there are over, say 20,000 stories?

Archie (and IDW) have released some good collections in the past, where it's obvious some thought and effort went into the selection of stories. I'm speaking of things like the Best of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s TPB collections, the Best of Archie Comics TPBs, and IDW's artist-focused Best Of collections. Even though it's obvious that the process of assembling those involved more time and thought going into them than the typical Archie digests, it feels like they've barely scratched the surface of classic Archie material that needs to be brought back. There must still be hundreds of forgotten gems still in the archives at ACP. The other thing would be theme collections, similar to a lot of the digital exclusive releases, like the "Archie 75 Series" of digital one-shots. They should be doing these as TPB collections, along with other character-centric collections. Yet even so, when there's a thematic collection of stories released, it never really seems like they spent enough time searching through the archives for the absolute best stories and greatest variety of highlights. Many of them seem like only vague attempts at justifying a theme or title concept. The collections editor just doesn't have the knowledge and love of ACP's rich history to assemble these collections in such a way that it shows, or is just making a lazy half-hearted attempt.

With the regular digests it's more difficult, since the main audience is young, and wouldn't be as likely to respond to the older stories, particularly if they can't understand the context of the culture of the times those stories were created, or various topical references or outdated technology or fads. They really need to hire or consult some ACP experts, because they could be doing a much better job of it. They also need to have some system that tracks which stories they HAVE reprinted, and STOP reprinting them over and over again. There's probably no need for any story to be reprinted again more than every 5 years, and with all the stories they have in their vaults, they really should be shooting for reprinting a story no more often than every 10 years. There's just an overall sameness and lack of variety to the digests. We used to get more old characters to spice up the variety of stories, like That Wilkin Boy, Suzie, Wilbur, Ginger, Cosmo, Madhouse, Super Duck, etc. in the digests of a couple of years ago, and now you hardly see those things at all any more. I miss the "From the Vault" sections, and in general just having the little discrete sections with its own cover page (which sort of made it like a comic book-within-a-comic book, if you know what I mean), and those sections need to be longer, more like between 15 and 20 pages instead of just 11 or 12. Or maybe they could have one longer section (15-20 pages, with its own cover page) and one shorter one (10-12 pages, with no cover page) in each digest, just to break up the sameness. There seems to be very little to differentiate the ARCHIE, ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE, and WORLD OF ARCHIE digests, even to a certain extent JUGHEAD AND ARCHIE, which seems to be downplaying Jughead stories in favor of more Archie stories in the last year or so. Each digest should feel like it has its own distinct flavor that makes it different from the others.

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