Jughead #9 covers are beautiful! 

Quote in the first cover:

Quote(IT'S KINDA LIKE A)
BRAND NEW #1
EXCEPT IT'S ISSUE #9

Derek Charm/Jughead #9


Audrey Mok/Jughead #9


Veronica Fish/Jughead #9


I think some people not interested in Jughead reboot will be interested now.

I'm not into Sabrina at all, but it will be interesting to see where they go with this.

I can't wait for this. I think ACP is finally listening to the fans. We complained about Erica ad nauseum and they changed the artist. Sabrina has always been a fan favorite and they're putting her in a story. They won't drop the whole reboot idea but at least now they are putting some fan ideas in it.

Erica may have gotten too expensive and ACP couldn't afford her anymore but I think the real reason is complaints about Erica's art and low sales. I'm not sure why they dropped Chip but I suspect because he has too many other projects or is too expensive. I suppose they could have planned all along to only do so many issues with this team but if the comic was really doing well I suspect they would've renegotiated their contract and kept them on. Usually the artists change frequently just to give artists a break but writers seem to stay. Writers are also way more prolific than comic artists maybe because it takes less time to write than draw.

I like all the covers but Audrey Mok's is my favorite.

I love the middle one because of Sabrina's dream. It's cool that all the flowers are all on her dress & nowhere else. Veronica Fish's cover is nice too.

Now I just realized no more Chip Zdarsky. I hope he still keeps doing covers. I like his covers.

Derek Charm starts with Jughead #7 in June. 

From Archie Comics Newsletter today:

QuoteDerek will be jumping on board starting with issue #7 in June as current writer Chip Zdarsky wraps up his run while Ryan joins on issue #9 and is bringing along with him none other than Sabrina the Teenage Witch!

It seems Jughead #6 will be the last Jughead by Erica Henderson.

Does anybody know anything about the 2 guys taking over? I don't.

Quote from: BettyReggie on May 11, 2016, 07:44:19 PM
Does anybody know anything about the 2 guys taking over? I don't.

Writer Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and artist Derek Charm (Star Trek: Starfleet Academy)

I think I like the Derek Charm cover best (with its attempt to appeal to those that gave up on the series earlier because they didn't like Erica's artwork - "It's kinda like a BRAND NEW #1 even though it's really ISSUE #9")     I actually hadn't noticed that the first time I looked at the cover previews (too busy studying the artwork), so now I understand why @irishmoxie had the impression that it was some kind of re-reboot. Hey, whatever it takes to get a reader who had given up on the title to pick it up again, right? It's kind of tongue-in-cheek humorous, while sending the message. The fact that it's only the Derek Charm cover that has that little blurb displayed indicates that they're telling you the artwork on the cover is what you can expect to see on the inside as well (variant covers make this confusing to people). So what that little blurb translates to is "Pick me up and look at me - I've got a whole new look!". I guess long experience in seeing every type of sales gimmick in the comic book industry makes it easier for me to "read the code" for what they're doing here.

I also like the artwork on Derek's cover better than the others. The other ones aren't bad, though.

This one really bothers me if it's going ahead the way it implies — and says the ACP is completely clueless about story dynamics ... and if they do it properly  anyway (unlikely but possible) then it'll be a real feat to not alienate their fans they've managed to carry over.

Pre-silver age stories were one-shots unless the situation just cried out for revisiting, "the situation" generally being the main character and his/her story, but stories need something to resolve — usually a conflict — or they don't really have a point or anything worth continued reading ... a protagonist/antagonist conflict, usually hero/villain, which is why the superheroes died off after WWII — the Nazis were their supervillain and without them they were lost: they had no other interesting conflict until the Silver age made Supervillains more than one-shot amusements ...  but Archie could get away with it because their conflicts were slice of life/growing pains/romance based — and when other companies turned to crime and horror for story inspiring conflict, Archie became the primary arbitrator of the CCA and made sure that that didn't happen ... until years into the silver age ...
What the other companies finally realized was that short one-shot self-contained stories didn't hold interest for long — you read them and forgot them ... if they were good you might come back until you hit a bad one or got bored or disgusted with the inconsistency, but no one cared until the stories got consistency and continuity and a "reality" of their own that people would want to come back to and see more of ... Archie never needed that because they were always the old style one-shots — only the characters themselves carried over and always the same ... their superhero line never got anywhere because it never really got out of that rut.  Later Archie stories tried to some extent — some early examples like "Time Police" are some of the best remembered, and as the 21st century progressed they did it more and more ... but they had tons of baggage and the multi-issue stories became just longer one-shots ...

To be successfully there has to be a tone, continuity and consistency across everything ... the new Riverdale (comics) seemed to be aiming for that — take the basic characters and have a consistent high school comedy/romance with continuity and it seemed to be working (although reconciling Archie & Jughead has been difficult — easier to call them separate realities) but it's a "real world" drama — the magic is (was) reserved for CHAoS & AWA and maybe Dark Circle ... bringing Sabrina in as a broom-riding witch? it breaks the whole thing ...

I see a few possibilities here — they do as implied and people lose interest, or Jughead spins off in it's own reality as a third Sabrina title (hopefully before it drags down Archie), or, as Jughead is now known for —  and the writer did say he would be following Chip's lead — the Sabrina encounter becomes a dream sequence (previous ones have figured prominently on covers before) which might disappoint/alienate some people ...

Sorry for the long ramble ...

Quote from: invisifan on May 12, 2016, 04:22:47 AM
This one really bothers me if it's going ahead the way it implies —

You lost me there, but maybe it would have helped if you summarized what you thought was being implied (and by what). That ARCHIE and JUGHEAD aren't precisely inhabiting the same universe? Um... why is that important, exactly? It's not a superhero universe (except when superheroes appear in Jughead). But it's no different than when Pureheart the Powerful appeared in LIFE WITH ARCHIE, but not in the other Archie comics being published at the same time. True, the readership is older now, but they'll just have to learn to live with it.

Quote from: invisifan on May 12, 2016, 04:22:47 AMTo be successfully there has to be a tone, continuity and consistency across everything ... the new Riverdale (comics) seemed to be aiming for that — take the basic characters and have a consistent high school comedy/romance with continuity and it seemed to be working (although reconciling Archie & Jughead has been difficult — easier to call them separate realities) but it's a "real world" drama — the magic is (was) reserved for CHAoS & AWA and maybe Dark Circle ... bringing Sabrina in as a broom-riding witch? it breaks the whole thing ...

I see a few possibilities here — they do as implied and people lose interest, or Jughead spins off in it's own reality as a third Sabrina title (hopefully before it drags down Archie), or, as Jughead is now known for —  and the writer did say he would be following Chip's lead — the Sabrina encounter becomes a dream sequence (previous ones have figured prominently on covers before) which might disappoint/alienate some people ...

Okay, so it's easier to call them separate realities. Why is that some kind of problem? Readers are going to lose interest if ARCHIE and JUGHEAD don't have a crossover story?? Is this a dealbreaker for anyone but you?

Jughead becomes a Sabrina title? Where are you getting that from? Did I miss something in the interview where Ryan says that Sabrina is the co-star of the title now? I just thought he said he liked Sabrina, that's all -- by way of explaining why he couldn't wait to put her in there.

But more to the point, why would the people at ACP running things all of a sudden turn into continuity freaks, or assume that's what the bulk of their readership is composed of? I really think the intersecting set of superhero universe fans (read: continuity freaks) who are also New Riverdale fans is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things. Sure it's possible to read and enjoy both but if you're going to expect Archie Comics to follow the same hidebound logic as superhero comics, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Archie Comics has always been loose (to say the very least) in its treatment of continuity, and the fact that the main cast has to be forever stuck in a time loop repeating the same grade in high school kind of makes that approach the only real way to go.

A too-realistic Archie can lead in only one direction, just as LIFE WITH ARCHIE lead to THE DEATH OF ARCHIE. (Just to be clear, I mean it leads to falling sales resulting in cancellation. Reality is not a friend to the basic underlying presumptions behind the Archie cast of characters, and it for sure isn't a friend to Jughead. In the long run you can only sell that to the older hardcore Archie fans, too small an audience by itself.)  I think you're the only one I've heard say something along the lines of "I can't possibly enjoy more than one of the New Riverdale titles unless you can give me the assurance that they are all in continuity with each other. Either I like ARCHIE or JUGHEAD, but not both if they're not in the same universe with each other. I better start seeing some cross-title continuity."

No, you're missing the point — I don't care about any of that (I'd like them to state definitively if they are the same continuity or not but it isn't a deal breaker either way), what I hope they don't do is introduce fantasy elements (witches or whatever) to their main line (ie. not Dark Circle/Horror) after they've made the reboot a much more grounded, reality based, continuity driven set of books ... it's all about consistency (which Archie has never been strong on — and for Classic Archie it didn't matter, but it's what the reboot needs to succeed).

Quote from: invisifan on May 12, 2016, 07:00:16 AM
No, you're missing the point — I don't care about any of that (I'd like them to state definitively if they are the same continuity or not but it isn't a deal breaker either way), what I hope they don't do is introduce fantasy elements (witches or whatever) to their main line (ie. not Dark Circle/Horror) after they've made the reboot a much more grounded, reality based, continuity driven set of books ... it's all about consistency (which Archie has never been strong on — and for Classic Archie it didn't matter, but it's what the reboot needs to succeed).

Keep the fantasy elements OUT of Archie? It's the ONLY thing that's kept me reading Jughead this long. The lack of that in Archie is exactly what makes it so boring to me (well, that and the fact that very little actually happened in the couple of issues I did read). I'd be willing to trade the fantasy elements for perhaps a seriously funny New Riverdale comic book, but that option doesn't even seem to be on the table.

Isn't continuity and consistency pretty much the same thing?

Quotethey've made the reboot a much more grounded, reality based, continuity driven set of books

That's a darned fine concise summary of everything I hate about them. That and the lack of FUNNY. I mean, apart from the artwork up to this point.

Continuity could mean a continuous storyline across multiple issues. Consistency could mean the same 5 page comedic stories with a clear resolution at the end--- basically the old Archie. When you picked up a digest, you knew pretty much what you were getting i.e. comfort food.