Quote
On a fateful trip to the beach, Betty and Veronica accidentally release a genie from her bottle, and she's willing to grant them three wishes. Will they get everything they want? Or will they wish they had never met her in the first place? Find out in "Sand-Wishes," the fun, new lead story to this summer annual—featuring even more pages of fun in the sun!


Script: Dan Parent
Art: Dan Parent
Cover: Dan Parent, Rich Koslowski, Rosario "Tito" Peña
On Sale Date: 6/15
192-page, full color comic
$5.99 U.S.

THIS from the ACP solicitations for June... Y'know, theoretically, this should be featuring Part 8 of "The Many Loves of Archie Andrews" as the new lead story. The previous issue, #243 would have been (and should still be) the episode featuring Archie with Amisha Mehta (swapped in the solicitations from issue 242, which - as published - featured Ginger Lopez [or at least Cinnamon Lopez, Ginger's cat] which was originally supposed to follow Amisha's episode, and had been slated for issue 243). That would have brought us up to episode #7 (out of the 10 chapters originally projected). As a reminder, each episode of "The Many Loves of Archie Andrews" (apart from the first and last ones) was supposed to feature ONE of the 8 girls who had nominated Archie for the "Boyfriend of the Year Award". With Amisha's chapter, that would have covered all the other girls except Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge, and left a final episode to wrap everything up. So, to reiterate, there should still be an episode forthcoming featuring Betty, another featuring Veronica, and a final episode to make a total of 10 episodes all together (going by what Dan Parent himself told me). But I don't know... the above digest doesn't sound like it's part of that series, and it makes no mention of the overall title, so I wonder now... because Fernando told us that all new stories in the digests are going to be limited to 5 pages (where "The Many Loves..." have typically all been 10 to 12 page stories) if they're not just abandoning the series now.


I'm pretty NOT happy about it.     

Maybe the series just didn't click with readers, or maybe the writers ran out of steam, or it didn't significantly increase Digest sales. As for Amisha's story, maybe it wasn't finished, or for whatever reason the editor didn't like it and chose not to run it.  Right now, ACP seems to be focusing more on the reboot and the Archie pilot film.

Amisha's episode of TMLoAA should still appear whenever B&VDD 243 comes out, since that month's solicitations also contained the solicitation for Fernando Ruiz' last story in Archie Double Digest (he didn't know it at the time he got the assignment, only after he turned it in). That means Dan Parent's story should also have been written and drawn before any edicts to limit new stories to only 5 pages were decided upon. (Dan's been writing stories for Archie for more than 20 years, so I doubt he's just going to suddenly "run out of steam".)

I'm hoping that they're simply skipping a month because whatever the subject of the next episode's story is (which would feature either Archie and Betty, or Archie and Veronica), it didn't fit with the "Summer Annual" theme, and the editor felt they needed a "summer fun" story to match the cover and season.

At least, I HOPE that's all it is. It's only 3 more episodes to finish off this series which would then allow ACP to collect it into trade paperback - or more likely now, a digital exclusive - at some point in the future (which seems like a small investment of extra pages to make against future potential earnings). If money at ACP is SO tight right now that they can't even afford to spring for the cost of 15 or so additional pages, then there's probably little hope that the company will be in business a year or two from now.

Sorry for the negatitvity in advance:

I think that if ACP cant cover the cost of 15 pages, then something is up.
If the TV SHOW fails, then most likely the reboot will also fail, leading to the (gasp) Death (tragic, I know) of ACP.


Let us hope not.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 03, 2016, 09:38:29 AM

I was wondering if we'd ever see streaky again — guess he jumped ship ...

Quote from: Archiver123 on April 03, 2016, 01:17:36 PM
Sorry for the negatitvity in advance:

I think that if ACP cant cover the cost of 15 pages, then something is up.
If the TV SHOW fails, then most likely the reboot will also fail, leading to the (gasp) Death (tragic, I know) of ACP.


Let us hope not.

ACP won't die — it'll be bought up for nothing by some bigger company (after they've finished trashing the brand maybe even IDW or Dark Horse could afford them ... and we might see something positive done with the characters.

Quote from: invisifan on April 03, 2016, 01:18:12 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 03, 2016, 09:38:29 AM

I was wondering if we'd ever see streaky again — guess he jumped ship ...

Who knew there was any X-Kryptonite hanging around Riverdale? I thought that was only a byproduct of Kara Zor-El's failed experiments to neutralize ordinary Green K. She should have known better than to mix kryptonite with catnip.

Quote from: invisifan on April 03, 2016, 01:22:17 PM

Quote from: Archiver123 on April 03, 2016, 01:17:36 PM
Sorry for the negatitvity in advance:

I think that if ACP cant cover the cost of 15 pages, then something is up.
If the TV SHOW fails, then most likely the reboot will also fail, leading to the (gasp) Death (tragic, I know) of ACP.


Let us hope not.

ACP won't die — it'll be bought up for nothing by some bigger company (after they've finished trashing the brand maybe even IDW or Dark Horse could afford them ... and we might see something positive done with the characters.

Let's hope.