Been a bit busy the past week. Apologies for not getting this posted sooner


Marvel Comics Digest #1
Excelsior! Marvel Comics' best-selling heroes are now in the ever-popular digest format! Each digest is a mixture of over 200 pages of the most memorable classic and modern stories, spanning every decade of Marvel history and readership. This first issue spotlights the Amazing Spider-Man, featuring art and stories from comic greats including Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Len Wein, Ross Andru and more. This is a can't-miss collector's item that will not be reprinted!
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel
On Sale Date: 6/7
224-page, full color comic
$6.99 U.S.


The Black Hood Series 2, #5
The Nobody makes his move on his ultimate target, while the Black Hood's mission of vengeance comes to a shocking conclusion!
Script: Duane Swierczynski
Art: Greg Scott, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Rachel Deering
The Black Hood S2, #5 CVR A Reg: Greg Smallwood
The Black Hood S2, #5 CVR B Var: Michael Walsh
On Sale Date: 5/24
32-page, full color comic
$3.99 U.S.


The Black Hood Volume 1: The Bullet's Kiss
COLLECTING THE BESTSELLING DEBUT ARC FROM THE ACCLAIMED TEAM OF SWIERCZYNSKI AND GAYDOS! A man driven to the brink, blacklisted and left brutally changed must crawl through the wreckage of his life to defeat a gang of deadly criminals hell-bent on setting the streets of Philadelphia aflame. The Black Hood is a visceral, modern crime noir tale told by two masters of the genre. Featuring an introduction from legendary crime writer Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones and many more)!
Script: Duane Swierczynski
Art: Michael Gaydos, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Rachel Deering
Cover: Michael Gaydos
ISBN-13: 978-1-61988-962-0
$14.99/$16.99CAN
TR
144 pp, Full Color
Direct Market On-Sale Date: 6/21


Archie #21
A phone call leaves everyone in Riverdale in a state of shock and despair!
Script: Mark Waid
Art: Pete Woods, Jack Morelli
Archie #21 CVR A Reg: Pete Woods
Archie #21 CVR B Var: Matthew Dow Smith
Archie #21 CVR C Var: Greg Smallwood
On Sale Date: 6/21
32-page, full color comic
$3.99 U.S.


Jughead #16
"Music, Magic & Mayhem" Part Two: Everyone is after Jughead! What sort of witchcraft has befallen our crowned hero, making him Riverdale's #1 target? Jughead finds himself in a mosh pit of doom in this special issue featuring Sabrina, Josie & the Pussycats, ZOMBIES and so much more!
Script: Mark Waid and Ian Flynn
Art: Derek Charm, Matt Herms and Jack Morelli
Jughead #16 CVR A Reg: Derek Charm
Jughead #16 CVR B Var: Stephen Byrne
Jughead #16 CVR C Var: Elliot Fernandez
On Sale Date: 6/28
32-page, full color comic
$3.99 U.S.


Riverdale #3
From Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and the writers of the new CW series Riverdale, this brand new, ongoing comic series offers a bold, subversive take on Archie, Betty, Veronica, Josie & the Pussycats and their friends, exploring small-town life and the darkness bubbling beneath Riverdale's wholesome façade, as based on the hit new CW TV series Riverdale.
Script: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Various
Art: Joe Eisma, Andre Szymanowicz, Janice Chiang, John Workman
Riverdale #3 CVR A Reg: Francesco Francavilla
Riverdale #3 CVR B Var: Marguerite Sauvage
Riverdale #3 CVR C Var: Wilfredo Torres
On Sale Date: 6/7
32-page, full color comic
$3.99 U.S.


Archie Summer Annual #280
It's SUMMER FUN MONTH! with the new lead story "Beachwatch"! They're filming a new "Beachwatch" movie on the beach, and Archie is thrilled to have gotten a part in it! But will he become a star, or will something cause him to get burned?
Script: Dan Parent
Art: Dan Parent
Cover: Dan Parent
On Sale Date: 6/28
192-page, full color comic
$5.99 U.S.


Archie's 75th Anniversary Digest #11
Celebrate Archie's 75^th anniversary in a special way with this commemorative digest that revisits the historic "Archie Marries" storyline!
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Various
On Sale Date: 6/28
224-page, full color comic
$6.99 U.S.


Betty & Veronica Comics Double Digest #255
SUMMER FUN MONTH continues with "Vacation Vexation"! The Coopers are taking an RV across the country. Betty invites Veronica, but camping isn't Veronica's thing. But when Veronica gets so lonely without her BFF, she helicopters her way to their location!
Script: Dan Parent
Art: Dan Parent
Cover: Dan Parent
On Sale Date: 6/21
160-page, full color comic
$4.99 U.S.


B&V Friends Jumbo Comics Digest #254
SUMMER FUN MONTH! In the new lead story "What A Break!" Veronica attempts to water ski, and breaks her leg in the process. When the girls get a look at the hot and hunky physical therapist that's helping her, they all come up with maladies of their own!
Script: Dan Parent
Art: Dan Parent
Cover: Dan Parent
On Sale Date: 6/14
256-page, full color comic
$6.99 U.S.


Complete Sabrina The Teenage Witch 1962-1971 (TR)
It's back to the beginning with Sabrina in this first of a new series compiling the entire history of everyone's favorite Teenage Witch! This graphic novel chronologically collects all the stories starring Sabrina the Teenage Witch from 1962 to 1965.
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Various
ISBN-13: 978-1-93697-594-5
$9.99 U.S./$10.99 CAN
TR
512 pp, black & white
Direct Market On-Sale Date: 6/7


World of Archie Comics Double Digest #69
SUMMER FUN MONTH rolls on with the new lead story "Beach Party Blossom." The gang starts their summer vacation with a beach party. When Cheryl finds out she's not invited, she decides to crash it, but Betty has a trick up her sleeve, which includes Cheryl's brother Jason.
Script: Dan Parent
Art: Dan Parent
Cover: Dan Parent
On Sale Date: 6/7
160-page, full color comic
$4.99 U.S.

I preordered all those Archie #21's & Jughead-Derek Charm's & The one with Sabrina & her cat. RiverDale #3, one with all 3 on it.

I really want to believe that the Sabrina book will be released...

...A historical point - Archie certainly made the digest format their own , but two former comics companies , Gold Key/Whitman/Western and Fawcett , had decent success with digests around the turn of the Seventies , years before I bought both Archie Comics Digest #1 and Jughead With Archie...(etc.) #1 off of the stands (at Plaza Discount in Pleasantville , NY , IIRC) .

Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

Maybe they're reprints of previously released material hoping nobody will notice.


Oops.......

It says the Sabrina book is black and white. That's probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. It's a shame that they aren't printing it the way these comics were originally published.

Here are scans of all 77 issues of the 1971 Sabrina comic book, and they are all in color. (You'll have to turn this into a proper link. I'm new on this board, so the software won't let me post the link in its proper form):

tinyurl dot com /ld7hyf5

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on March 28, 2017, 08:33:52 PM
Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

No lie -- that's exactly what passed through my mind when I first laid eyes on the solicitation!

Quote from: ASS-P on March 28, 2017, 04:08:18 AM
...A historical point - Archie certainly made the digest format their own , but two former comics companies , Gold Key/Whitman/Western and Fawcett , had decent success with digests around the turn of the Seventies , years before I bought both Archie Comics Digest #1 and Jughead With Archie...(etc.) #1 off of the stands (at Plaza Discount in Pleasantville , NY , IIRC) .

Both Marvel and DC Comics had a small line of digest titles in the 1980s. DC's longest-running digest title, THE BEST OF DC BLUE RIBBON DIGEST, ran for 71 issues from September 1979 through April 1986. Collectively speaking, the number of digest issues published by Marvel and DC outnumbered the better-remembered oversized Treasury Editions and Limited Collector's Editions.

Quote from: Hiram Lodge on March 29, 2017, 08:48:20 PM
It says the Sabrina book is black and white. That's probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. It's a shame that they aren't printing it the way these comics were originally published.

The information contained in the solicitation is contradictory, but you are in error in believing that this book contains reprints of every story from the 77 issues of SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH published from 1971-1983. If that were true, this book would need to be close to 2000 pages.

QuoteComplete Sabrina The Teenage Witch 1962-1971 (TR)
It's back to the beginning with Sabrina in this first of a new series compiling the entire history of everyone's favorite Teenage Witch! This graphic novel chronologically collects all the stories starring Sabrina the Teenage Witch from 1962 to 1965.
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Various
ISBN-13: 978-1-93697-594-5
$9.99 U.S./$10.99 CAN
TR
512 pp, black & white
Direct Market On-Sale Date: 6/7

The title of the book says "Complete ... 1962-1971", where the actual solicitation copy cites instead the years 1962-1965. The solicitation copy claims the book is 512 pages (and the cover image confirms that the book indeed contains "Over 500 Pages of Comics"). Since the years 1962-1965 would only account for Sabrina's earliest appearances within the pages of ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE, clearly that would not add up to over 500 pages of comics, so we can assume that solicitation copy to be the error, and the title's citation of the years 1962-1971 to be the accurate description of what the book actually contains. What that translates to is all of Sabrina's appearances in ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE and ARCHIE'S TV LAUGH-OUT (just the Sabrina stories from the first ten 52-page Giant-size issues, published from December 1969 through November 1971), plus the entire contents of the first four 52-page Giant-size issues of SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH, published from April through December 1971. It's difficult to say accurately whether the number of Sabrina story pages in the relevant issues (especially as the MADHOUSE appearances are scattered and irregular) add up to "over 500 pages of comics".

Comparatively speaking, even though this is in black and white, it's a good buy at $10 for over 500 pages of comics. For comparison purposes, consider that ACP charges $7 for a Jumbo Comics Digest issue that contains only 256 pages of comics. It's also fair to compare this format to one that was used recently by both Marvel (for it's ESSENTIAL trade collections) and DC (for it's SHOWCASE PRESENTS trade collections). Both of those companies published those formats with slightly over 500 pages of comics reprinted in black and white. DC's original price for a volume in this series was $17 beginning in 2005 (which later went up to $20 before the series ended at the end of 2015). Marvel charged $15 when their series of Essential trade collections began in 1996, also later increasing the price to $20 per volume before the format was discontinued in 2013 (although Marvel's Essentials also sometimes ran as high as over 580 pages, depending on the individual volume in question). In comparison to that, $10 for 512 pages doesn't seem overpriced.

The sad economic fact is that there just isn't enough consumer demand for these type of non-Riverdale-centric series reprints to justify reprinting the stories in paperback in full color at a higher cover price. I can't force anyone to buy it if the black and white format is so disgusting to them that they'd rather go without reading these stories, but just to be realistic, you should realize that passing on this format isn't going to result in ACP reprinting the stories in some other cheap color format containing a lot of pages. The only other viable economic alternative to this for non-Archie stories would be about half the page-count in a hardcover collection priced somewhere in the $40-$60 price range.

Yes, you can always download pirated scans of the issues from someone else's comic book collection -- which, I guess, is the only alternative we'll all be left with when ACP goes out of business.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 31, 2017, 02:29:07 AM

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on March 28, 2017, 08:33:52 PM
Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

No lie -- that's exactly what passed through my mind when I first laid eyes on the solicitation!

I haven't followed The Black Hood's sales TOO closely, but from what I remember seeing each issue of this "Season Two" or whatever they're calling this latest batch of issues seem to sell around two thousand copies. On at least ONE of Diamond's list direct market sales figures, it was dead last. At 2K copies, this book is selling around where the pre-reboot Jughead title... previously Archie Comics' WORST selling book... was and this book is significantly more expensive to produce. It HAS to be losing money!


At a 3.99 cover price and selling two-thousand copies, this book is bringing in roughly 8000.00. Unless Archie Comics has negotiated a special deal, Diamond usually takes around half of that money leaving ACP with a paltry four grand! Consider printing costs and the creative team on this book and we're looking at a financial sinkhole! Just to give you an idea... I'm not sure how many actual story pages are in an issue of The Black Hood but let's say its the standard twenty pages of story and art. If they're paying the artist 100.00 per page to draw this thing... and for a book like this that would be pretty LOW... each issue of The Black Hood is costing two-thousand dollars just to get drawn! And we're not even considering the scripting, the lettering, or the colorist yet! In many circumstances that 2K wouldn't be a lot, but when the book is pulling in only 4K, you can see the problem.


The only hope and monkey wrench in all this is maybe this thing is selling phenomenally well digitally.

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on March 31, 2017, 09:37:25 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 31, 2017, 02:29:07 AM

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on March 28, 2017, 08:33:52 PM
Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

No lie -- that's exactly what passed through my mind when I first laid eyes on the solicitation!

I haven't followed The Black Hood's sales TOO closely, but from what I remember seeing each issue of this "Season Two" or whatever they're calling this latest batch of issues seem to sell around two thousand copies. On at least ONE of Diamond's list direct market sales figures, it was dead last. At 2K copies, this book is selling around where the pre-reboot Jughead title... previously Archie Comics' WORST selling book... was and this book is significantly more expensive to produce. It HAS to be losing money!


At a 3.99 cover price and selling two-thousand copies, this book is bringing in roughly 8000.00. Unless Archie Comics has negotiated a special deal, Diamond usually takes around half of that money leaving ACP with a paltry four grand! Consider printing costs and the creative team on this book and we're looking at a financial sinkhole! Just to give you an idea... I'm not sure how many actual story pages are in an issue of The Black Hood but let's say its the standard twenty pages of story and art. If they're paying the artist 100.00 per page to draw this thing... and for a book like this that would be pretty LOW... each issue of The Black Hood is costing two-thousand dollars just to get drawn! And we're not even considering the scripting, the lettering, or the colorist yet! In many circumstances that 2K wouldn't be a lot, but when the book is pulling in only 4K, you can see the problem.


The only hope and monkey wrench in all this is maybe this thing is selling phenomenally well digitally.

You never know what goes on behind the scenes. Well, not you personally, any more... but I meant that in the sense of general readers/observers of the comics industry. Something like that seems so counter-intuitive to business logic that it makes you wonder.

It reminds me of that brief period in 1954 when Martin Goodman decided (based, it would seem, on Superman having become a television series) to try reviving his superhero comics. For a scant few months, Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner were published in their own titles again for the first time since 1949, with a couple of anthology titles tossed into the bargain. Then Captain America, the Human Torch, and the anthology titles all abruptly ceased again, and only the Sub-Mariner's revived comic book continued on for another year or so. Was Sub-Mariner really that much more popular than the other super-characters, that his title survived while the others did not? Turns out that it wasn't the case. Sub-Mariner was briefly optioned with the idea of basing a television series on the character (exactly, it seems, as Goodman had hoped in reviving the characters). Ultimately, it didn't happen, and the title quietly expired again.

Which makes me wonder if maybe someone didn't express interest in producing a Black Hood TV series -- certainly the type of thing, to my mind, much better suited to HBO or Showtime than to the comic book they're publishing. I'm far from convinced that what the comic book industry needs is television shows drawn in comic book form. Something like that is the only thing that would seem to account for the kooky logic of continuing to publish a comic book series that sells only 2000 copies per issue.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 31, 2017, 04:52:19 AM

Quote from: Hiram Lodge on March 29, 2017, 08:48:20 PM
It says the Sabrina book is black and white. That's probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. It's a shame that they aren't printing it the way these comics were originally published.

The information contained in the solicitation is contradictory, but you are in error in believing that this book contains reprints of every story from the 77 issues of SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH published from 1971-1983. If that were true, this book would need to be close to 2000 pages.

QuoteComplete Sabrina The Teenage Witch 1962-1971 (TR)
It's back to the beginning with Sabrina in this first of a new series compiling the entire history of everyone's favorite Teenage Witch! This graphic novel chronologically collects all the stories starring Sabrina the Teenage Witch from 1962 to 1965.
Script: Various
Art: Various
Cover: Various
ISBN-13: 978-1-93697-594-5
$9.99 U.S./$10.99 CAN
TR
512 pp, black & white
Direct Market On-Sale Date: 6/7

The title of the book says "Complete ... 1962-1971", where the actual solicitation copy cites instead the years 1962-1965. The solicitation copy claims the book is 512 pages (and the cover image confirms that the book indeed contains "Over 500 Pages of Comics"). Since the years 1962-1965 would only account for Sabrina's earliest appearances within the pages of ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE, clearly that would not add up to over 500 pages of comics, so we can assume that solicitation copy to be the error, and the title's citation of the years 1962-1971 to be the accurate description of what the book actually contains. What that translates to is all of Sabrina's appearances in ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE and ARCHIE'S TV LAUGH-OUT (just the Sabrina stories from the first ten 52-page Giant-size issues, published from December 1969 through November 1971), plus the entire contents of the first four 52-page Giant-size issues of SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH, published from April through December 1971. It's difficult to say accurately whether the number of Sabrina story pages in the relevant issues (especially as the MADHOUSE appearances are scattered and irregular) add up to "over 500 pages of comics".

Comparatively speaking, even though this is in black and white, it's a good buy at $10 for over 500 pages of comics. For comparison purposes, consider that ACP charges $7 for a Jumbo Comics Digest issue that contains only 256 pages of comics. It's also fair to compare this format to one that was used recently by both Marvel (for it's ESSENTIAL trade collections) and DC (for it's SHOWCASE PRESENTS trade collections). Both of those companies published those formats with slightly over 500 pages of comics reprinted in black and white. DC's original price for a volume in this series was $17 beginning in 2005 (which later went up to $20 before the series ended at the end of 2015). Marvel charged $15 when their series of Essential trade collections began in 1996, also later increasing the price to $20 per volume before the format was discontinued in 2013 (although Marvel's Essentials also sometimes ran as high as over 580 pages, depending on the individual volume in question). In comparison to that, $10 for 512 pages doesn't seem overpriced.

The sad economic fact is that there just isn't enough consumer demand for these type of non-Riverdale-centric series reprints to justify reprinting the stories in paperback in full color at a higher cover price. I can't force anyone to buy it if the black and white format is so disgusting to them that they'd rather go without reading these stories, but just to be realistic, you should realize that passing on this format isn't going to result in ACP reprinting the stories in some other cheap color format containing a lot of pages. The only other viable economic alternative to this for non-Archie stories would be about half the page-count in a hardcover collection priced somewhere in the $40-$60 price range.

Yes, you can always download pirated scans of the issues from someone else's comic book collection -- which, I guess, is the only alternative we'll all be left with when ACP goes out of business.

I know the upcoming book doesn't include all 77 issues of the 1971 series. I was just showing where you could read them in color.

I have several Archie comics trade paperbacks that are more than 400 pages each. The pages are a little bit bigger than the digests, and the paper is higher quality. And they were about $15 each.

I would gladly pay $20 for the Sabrina book if it was in color.

Quote from: Hiram Lodge on April 02, 2017, 12:31:08 AM

I know the upcoming book doesn't include all 77 issues of the 1971 series. I was just showing where you could read them in color.

I have several Archie comics trade paperbacks that are more than 400 pages each. The pages are a little bit bigger than the digests, and the paper is higher quality. And they were about $15 each.

I would gladly pay $20 for the Sabrina book if it was in color.

And I would gladly pay $40-$50 for a hardcover volume of 250-300 pages on better paper in color (similar to THE BEST OF ARCHIE COMICS - DELUXE EDITION), but I doubt if either your wishes or mine are going to be realized in this case. There doesn't appear to be a large enough audience willing to support a color trade paperback collection composed entirely of nothing but Sabrina stories.

Cases in point:

- ACP solicited a similar TP collection (in color) composed of equal parts Sabrina, Josie, and Little Archie stories last year, under the title ARCHIE'S BIG BOOK: MAGIC, MUSIC, & MISCHIEF. The solicitation was later cancelled and the TP was never published (and we can presume that was due to low pre-orders).

- A couple of months ago ACP solicited SABRINA 80 PAGE GIANT COMIC #1. That too has since been cancelled and removed from the publishing schedule.

- This is at least the third (and maybe fourth) time this particular COMPLETE SABRINA collection has been solicited, going back to several years ago for the first time. To date it still hasn't been published, and I doubt that this solicitation will fare any better, to be frank -- in spite of the relatively cheap $10 asking price.


Your tastes and mine simply don't reflect those of the majority of consumers. My advice here would be to take what you can get, if by some miracle The Complete Sabrina TP actually does wind up being published this time. You can hold out for color, and maybe if you're willing to wait enough years, you never know what could change. Enough Marvel Comics consumers eventually demanded color trade paperback reprint collections of the stories formerly comprising the contents of their b&w ESSENTIALS trade collections that they wound up discontinuing that branding and format, replacing it with what are currently known as the Marvel EPIC COLLECTIONs. Those trade paperbacks retail for between $35 and $40 cover price, depending on page count and the popularity of the series reprinted. It's interesting to note that many of the stories which are common to being reprinted as both Essential and Epic Collections were reprinted even earlier as part of the hardcover Marvel Masterworks collections. Those HCs were initially priced at $30 per volume (for 10 consecutive issues of a given series), when that format began in the early 1990s. At the time the b&w Essentials collections were introduced in the mid-1990s, they represented a "bargain-priced" alternative edition of the same comics being reprinted in the HC Masterworks series -- twice the amount of content in page-count, but at half the cover price of the HC series. In fact the Masterworks HC series still continues today with occasional releases, but over the length of time that the Masterworks line has continued, the standard cover price has increased that so that currently, the same page-count volumes cost $75. The Marvel Epic Collection TPs published today retail for an even higher cover price than the Marvel Masterworks HC collections did when that program began decades ago. I mention all this by way of example of the economic realities of comic book publishing in 2017. Don't forget to take into account that ACP isn't Marvel by any stretch of the imagination, in terms of its consumer base.