After reading the new release announcements (by the way, where's October's?), I'm confused. Some stories are advertised as "new", but others are advertised as "lead" (which probably means it's just the first old story in the digest).

Would someone please list the new stories in the digests, going back however many years that they've had credits on every story? (Before that, it was simple; new stories had credits; reprints didn't.)

Quote from: The Downloader on August 30, 2016, 01:16:58 PM
I Did October's so it is not listed.

Where is it?

When I spoke to Dan Parent a couple of weeks ago, he confirmed that he is indeed the only artist left doing new classic Archie stories for ACP. The stories described in solicitations as "lead" (but not as "new") may either have appeared somewhere before, or been completed some time ago and were part of an inventory of stories that haven't appeared elsewhere prior to their recent digest appearances.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 30, 2016, 03:10:04 PM
When I spoke to Dan Parent a couple of weeks ago, he confirmed that he is indeed the only artist left doing new classic Archie stories for ACP. The stories described in solicitations as "lead" (but not as "new") may either have appeared somewhere before, or been completed some time ago and were part of an inventory of stories that haven't appeared elsewhere prior to their recent digest appearances.

So, at Grand Comics Database, if a story is credited solely to Dan Parent in a recent digest, and it doesn't have a reprint note, it's probably new, right?

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 30, 2016, 03:38:34 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 30, 2016, 03:10:04 PM
When I spoke to Dan Parent a couple of weeks ago, he confirmed that he is indeed the only artist left doing new classic Archie stories for ACP. The stories described in solicitations as "lead" (but not as "new") may either have appeared somewhere before, or been completed some time ago and were part of an inventory of stories that haven't appeared elsewhere prior to their recent digest appearances.

So, at Grand Comics Database, if a story is credited solely to Dan Parent in a recent digest, and it doesn't have a reprint note, it's probably new, right?

I didn't think to ask him about this specifically, but I get the impression that there isn't any backlog of inventoried stories that Dan Parent drew which haven't seen print to this point. I think you can safely assume that the Dan Parent lead stories seen in the digests in the last couple of years are his most recent work. I think I would have noticed in the solicitations if they failed to describe one of DP's lead stories as 'new', so I don't think that's happened yet. The Kennedy brothers stories you're still seeing appear as the leads in digests this year since April/May or so are inventory stories, and those of a few other artists.

I haven't seen a digest lead story that I can recall having read somewhere before so far, but that's fairly meaningless, given that I have a pretty incomplete collection of Archie Comics from the 5 or 10 years preceding 2014. Seeing as how issues from that same time period are only randomly indexed at GCD, I don't know how you'd tell for sure if the non-DP stories represented their first appearance in print, or a reprint, unless you could remember having read it before, or point to a specific issue where it had appeared previously. Added to that, there's no real way of estimating how big an inventory of unpublished material ACP might still have on hand, or exactly how far back those stories might go, in terms of when they were written and drawn. So if a digest solicitation text doesn't describe the lead story as "new", then what exactly does that mean -- it's been published before, or maybe just that it was written & drawn some time ago, but never published before?

They've been doing new lead stories in digests since the 90's. I have some digests from then with stories that aren't printed elsewhere. Another thing I noticed is that these lead stories aren't heavily reprinted like other stories are.

Quote from: The Downloader on August 31, 2016, 02:20:27 AM

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 30, 2016, 02:15:48 PM

Quote from: The Downloader on August 30, 2016, 01:16:58 PM
I Did October's so it is not listed.

Where is it?

http://www.archiefans.com/all-about-archie/octobernovember-2016-archie-comics-solicits-(super-hype)/msg5684/#msg5684

Thanks.

Incidentally, in the October solicits, Archie Comics touts a "new" story written by Tom DeFalco and written by Pat and Tim Kennedy and a "brand new" story written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by the Kennedys:

http://archiecomics.com/october-2016-solicitations/

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 31, 2016, 01:24:43 PM
Incidentally, in the October solicits, Archie Comics touts a "new" story written by Tom DeFalco and written by Pat and Tim Kennedy and a "brand new" story written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by the Kennedys:

http://archiecomics.com/october-2016-solicitations/

There's nothing inherently deceptive in those solicitations if by "new" they mean "1st publication". Despite however long a story may have been sitting on the shelf, it's still "new" if no one has read it before, even if it was written and drawn a few years ago.

So here's an interesting example of an inventoried story. WORLD OF ARCHIE ANNUAL #62 (which just came in the mail today) has a lead story written by Alex Simmons and drawn by Rex Lindsey titled "Happiness Is A Wagging Tale". Now, I'm not going to try to figure out when the last time I read a new story drawn by Rex Lindsey was, but let's just say... "it's been a while".

The interesting bit here is that this is one of those stories that contains a rarely-seen editorial footnote, referencing Vegas's appearance and adoption by Archie as a pet (*See ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #244). #244?? Archie Double Digest is up to issue #271 now! ADD #244 came out in November of 2013. It hardly seems like they'd footnote a story from that long ago, so a reasonable guess-timate would be to assume this story was written and drawn sometime within a year of that (more likely, mere months from issue #244). This story would appear to have been sitting on the shelf for two years, give or take a couple of months.

As long as the new/inventoried stories don't feature dated pop cultural references we'll be good. Or maybe it would be more fun if they did??

Quote from: irishmoxie on September 03, 2016, 09:19:25 PM
As long as the new/inventoried stories don't feature dated pop cultural references we'll be good. Or maybe it would be more fun if they did??

That was one of the things I was focusing on in this story. There's an incidental character in it, Denny, who's a new freshman student and Dilton's helping him set up a blog page. Of course, at the speed things are moving, blogging isn't what they used to be, even just a few years ago.  Nothing mentioned in the story analogous to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or anything like that.