BEN 10, Season 3 (Cartoon Network, 2006/07) - 13 episodes, 25 min. each. I'm slowly working my way through this entire series, and its sequel incarnations Ben 10 Alien Force and Ben 10 Ultimate Alien, at the rate of 1 DVD disc per day (between 5 and 8 episodes).

Quote from: Captain Jetpack on January 20, 2017, 08:19:53 AM
What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

So is that just a vote for Reggie in general, or was there some specific issue of REGGIE AND ME that you were thinking of? 

Quote from: irishmoxie on January 20, 2017, 06:58:04 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 20, 2017, 12:24:25 AM
AVENGERS #3.1
KILL OR BE KILLED #5
ARCHIE #16 - It didn't change my opinion.
REVOLUTIONARIES #1
SUPERMAN #15
SUPER POWERS #3 (of 6)
JLA THE RAY: REBIRTH #1
CAVE CARSON HAS A CYBERNETIC EYE #4
CAGE #4 (of 4)
BLACK WIDOW #10
WALT DISNEY'S COMICS & STORIES #736
BLACK HAMMER GIANT SIZED ANNUAL #1
COUGAR AND CUB #1
DOLLFACE #1
CURSE WORDS #1
STAR TREK: WAYPOINT #3 (of 6)
KAMANDI CHALLENGE SPECIAL #1

How's Dollface?

By the same creative team as Zombie Tramp (which I haven't read, but the character appears in this first issue). Action Lab publishes some interesting stuff, but it's all over the map. Some of it is bottom-of-the-barrel crap, and some of it has an interesting alt/UG vibe. This is one of their "Danger Zone" (Mature Readers) titles, but they also publish a lot of kid-friendly stuff too. I may read a couple more issues of this to see if there's anything to it, but I'm undecided at this point. The first issue didn't seem to have a lot of depth to it, but a didn't get much of a sense of where (if anywhere) the story was going. Cougar and Cub #1 (also published by Action Lab/Danger Zone) was the more interesting (and funny) of the two titles I read by that company this week.

Link to the company's website: http://www.actionlabcomics.com/ Looking over their other titles, I'd imagine that there are other things they publish that might interest you a lot more than Dollface. I've only read a scant few of their titles.

AVENGERS #3.1
KILL OR BE KILLED #5
ARCHIE #16 - It didn't change my opinion.
REVOLUTIONARIES #1
SUPERMAN #15
SUPER POWERS #3 (of 6)
JLA THE RAY: REBIRTH #1
CAVE CARSON HAS A CYBERNETIC EYE #4
CAGE #4 (of 4)
BLACK WIDOW #10
WALT DISNEY'S COMICS & STORIES #736
BLACK HAMMER GIANT SIZED ANNUAL #1
COUGAR AND CUB #1
DOLLFACE #1
CURSE WORDS #1
STAR TREK: WAYPOINT #3 (of 6)
KAMANDI CHALLENGE SPECIAL #1

Quote from: Upsiditus on January 18, 2017, 09:11:05 PM
  I would suppose at some point, Archie probably did date a girl named "Sheila."  I never understood the song "Waldo P. Emerson Jones"-presumably he would be related to Jughead, and yet this is never explained. 
    There must be stories that claim that Archie and his classmates are juniors (and perhaps a few that give their age as 16).  However, most stories don't claim a grade or age, and the idea of them being seniors works just as well.  There can't be much continuity-the Archie from Archie Comics Number One would be in his 90s now...

Maybe Archie did date a girl named Sheila at some point, but did he ever date someone named "Skooby Doo"? It's best not to think too much about the lyrics of The Archies' songs as applying to the characters and stories. Especially if you really listen to the lyrics of the song "Hot Dog".

The internal logic of the stories points to nothing specific to them being seniors. There are even stories that have them making reference to other students (incidental characters) as being seniors, which implies that Archie and the gang are not. If they were, they'd have to worry about college applications, or what their plans were for after graduation. Maybe Archie and Jughead don't spend much time thinking about that stuff, but what about Betty, Veronica, or Dilton? There are plenty of stories where we see the school year ending and summer vacation beginning, but we never saw them having a graduation ceremony. Even Prom stories don't have any finality to them, with any of them acting as if this is the last Prom they'll ever attend, which would be the case if they were seniors.

No, the only thing that makes sense is that they don't worry too much about that stuff just yet, because when school lets out for summer vacation, they know they'll be back at RHS again next September. This is the last time in their high school education that they won't have to worry about their lives changing dramatically in the next few months. And indeed they are back from summer vacation in the fall -- only somehow, by the magic of comic books, the summer vacation after their junior year has magically become the summer vacation before their junior year when they return to classes in September.

BEN 10, Season 2 - (Cartoon Network, 2006) - 13 episodes, 25 min. each

Quote from: Upsiditus on January 17, 2017, 09:19:17 PM
I recall in the book Archie: His First 50 Years, author Charles Phillips refers to the Archie characters (Archie and his classmates) as being 17.  Also there was a song on the first Archies LP called "17 Ain't Young."  This led me to believe that Archie is supposed to be a high school senior.

It's not a great book. I wouldn't put too much stock in what you read in it as gospel truth. And if you want to take your information from The Archies' songs, then you probably believe Archie has a girlfriend named Sheila and a rival named Waldo P. Emerson-Jones.

But if you want to know the real reason Archie and his friends are Juniors in Riverdale High School, it's because Riverdale High is really Haverhill High School, and Archie is really Bob Montana. Bob Montana always said he based Archie on himself, and Riverdale High on his old high school, Haverhill High -- because at the time Archie was created, Bob considered those years at Haverhill High the best years of his life. But Bob Montana never completed his Senior year at Haverhill High, as his family then moved from Haverhill to Manchester, NH. When people asked him about Archie, he never mentioned that year he spent as a senior at Central High in Manchester. Most of the cast of characters of Archie are all based on people Bob Montana knew while at Haverhill High.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 17, 2017, 07:13:22 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 14, 2017, 01:01:27 PM
Not sure what you mean by the "de-aging of other adults". Who, specifically?  I guess there was Cousin Ambrose, which I don't think they explained in the comic, but he was a different story from the aunts, not having appeared much (if at all) since the early 1980s.

I meant in the Archieverse at large, specifically Betty's parents - especially her dad, who morphed from "Old Man" Cooper to a grey-haired Hal to a brown-haired Hal. Alice also started out with grey hair and then got her hair color back.

Okay... confused. In the context of what we were discussing (comparing the Sabrina comics contemporaneous with the live-action TV series, and how the show influenced the comics), it sounded like you were saying something about other adult characters from the Sabrina series being de-aged in the comics due to the way those characters were cast as younger in the show (which was obviously exactly the case with Aunts Hilda and Zelda).

There's no mystery about the de-aging of the parents going on over the course of a few decades in the Archieverse at large, which wasn't influenced in any way by Archie's world as depicted in any other media. Rather, the question we should probably be asking is why the parents were originally depicted as looking more like grandparents than parents (because unlike Hilda and Zelda, they really aren't hundreds of years old). That seems to be common to all media when you look at older movies from the 1930s and 40s. Not sure why, but I guess it has to do with them wanting to contrast the parents with teenagers as being more serious, mature, responsible and having the wisdom of life experience. As far as the de-aging goes, it was a gradual thing, not something you can pinpoint at some moment in time where by editorial decree it was decided to "reboot" the parents. It might reflect the reality of advancements in health care and people just generally becoming more conscious of diet and exercise. Interestingly, certain characters who appeared far more frequently in the stories never had their appearance significantly altered - Mr. Lodge and Fred Andrews, among the parents, and Mr. Weatherbee, Coach Kleats, Miss Grundy (although she did become "Ms." Grundy), and Mrs. Beazly (who has always reminded me eerily of a transgendered Popeye). In the case of Mrs. Beazly, the real shocker there was in discovering that she had a beautiful teenage daughter.

A little while ago I read a story where Mr. Cooper had blond hair and was balding on top, and his first name was Joe. I can't remember the exact issue # of ARCHIE it was, but it was circa 1970 or so, give or take a couple of years.

Quote from: Upsiditus on January 15, 2017, 09:45:35 PM

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on January 11, 2017, 10:35:30 PM

Quote from: Thestereotypebuster on January 11, 2017, 09:29:26 PM
I mean, we wouldn't want stories about Archie driving a jalopy and the characters making jokes about women drivers now a days, would we?

I would. I like those stories. There's something really endearing about them.
But I get what you're saying. And yet, even if throughout the years Archie has always been trying to be up to date with the modern times, the comics still feel vintage-y and nostalgic. At least that's how I feel about them. I don't know how to explain it exactly. Like for example, me as a kid in the 1980s reading 80s Archie stories, I never felt like they were modern. They always had that old (in a good way) feeling. Same in the 90s, same in the early 2000s. That is what I love about them. The classic, vintage, innocent feeling. That's what this new spin is lacking.

   When fictional stories are set in the present, they are not supposed to be any specific year, from what I understand.

You can find many stories where the year is mentioned, if not a specific month or day. When those stories get reprinted years later in the digests, the year originally mentioned is edited to change it to the time of the current reprinting.

Time in general is a problem for Archie comics, because the basic premise is that any story taking place in "the present" means that Archie and his friends are in their Junior year at Riverdale High. Therefore, no matter how long ago a story was printed, no more time can have passed between that story and "the present" current Archie stories than the summer prior to the start of Junior year (which is always the current year, or September of the year before). Internal evidence of the time of year tells you when, during (or just before) the current school year the story is taking place. It's kind of a problem because certain events are going to occur only once during the course of the gang's Junior year at RHS, so when there's a story about a class election or the Junior Prom, it immediately voids all previous stories (as far as any continuity is concerned) based on those events that were printed in earlier-published comics.

Quote from: irishmoxie on January 16, 2017, 02:32:51 PM
Is it entirely collected in print form? Or did you read some of it online?

I THINK every single webcomic page she did eventually got collected in a print version funded through Kickstarter (although the last one, Night Classes, was a standard format 32-page floppy comic (it was only 22 pages of story in webcomic form). Most of the printed versions were filled out with some sort of extra material to even out the page counts.

The way I read it was this. I literally spent hours and hours paging through every webcomic page she had posted from 2009 through 2014 (three times a week, as I mentioned), so even though I say the webcomic pages amounted to about 380, that was 380 pages of SCHOOL BITES alone, but the actual number of posts in the archives during that period, paging through one at a time, was more like 500-something, because a lot of the posts were "filler". But I wasn't actually reading the story while I was doing that. No, at that point my only objective was to right-click on every SB webcomic page, choose "Save Image As", and file it in a folder somewhere. At some point when I saw how frequently she was starting to post non-SB pages, I started saving those too (figuring that it would be easier to sort them into different folders as I went along, rather than go back if I decided I wanted to find them later). There's no drop-down menu that identifies the individual archive pages by title or page number either, just bookmarks at the first page for each new story arc. So I spent a few nights doing that for a couple of hours a night, and wound up with 1 folder for each of the different SB stories (8 "issues" of different lengths, although on her drop-down menu she calls them "Chapters" and there are 11 (because she split a few of the stories into Part 1 and Part 2). I sorted special 1-page gags into a different folder, "Life With Prince Pangur Ban" strips into another, sketches and pin-ups into another. Some of the odd non-story pages I just wound up deleting later after I'd really looked at them, but I figured it was easier to save the images and throw away the ones I didn't need later, rather than go back and try to find something I wished I'd saved but didn't. Some of the page images I had to crop later on to remove ad banners at the bottom for Kickstarters when she happened to be running those.

After all that was done, I opened up the folders one at a time, beginning with issue #1, Chapter 1: "Orientation, Part 1", and was then able to read through it like it was a normal comic story instead of a webcomic.  So essentially I just made my own digital version by saving all the story page images as JPGs, so I could read it offline by just clicking through one image at a time. Basically I just used the same method I did for reading all of the Pixie Trix Comix and Henchgirl (although I discovered the latter as a print comic first). It's too labor-intensive a way of getting a digital comic out of a bunch of webpages for most sane people to consider, but I'm obsessed enough with my comics that I want to optimize the reading experience, and webcomics really aren't an optimal way of reading long-form comic stories, unless they're gag-a-day strips (which I guess sort of works for MA3, but my criticisms of MA3 would fall into a different category).

She still sells the printed versions (and also a digital version) on the Broadsword Comics website, but I haven't actually seen them yet, so I can't compare and tell you if she added, subtracted, or revised or altered any of the webcomic pages as they remain now posted in her archives. "SCHOOL BITES Vol. 1" is the "Orientation" story (Parts 1 & 2) and "SCHOOL BITES Vol. 2" is the story "Blood Drinking 101" (Parts 1 & 2), and she sells those (approx. 64 pages, manga size paperback) for $10 each. Those existed before she started the webcomic (Diamond Comics distributed them in 2004 and 2005), so the print version came before the webcomic. After those 2 stories she posted all the stories as webcomic pages first, and then later ran Kickstarters to fund the print versions. After the first two volumes comes the print collection SCHOOL BITES: SPECIAL SEMESTER COLLECTION, which contains the stories "Phys Ed", "Music Theory" and "DETENTION" (which I'm calling issues #3, 4, & 5) and is 128 pages for $20, same physical dimensions as the first 2 volumes. The next print comic is called SCHOOL BITES: INDEPENDENT STUDIES and contains the stories "Private Lessons" and "Home Ec" (Parts 1 & 2), which I'm calling issues #6 & 7, also 128 pages for $20, and the last one is the 32-page floppy comic, SCHOOL BITES: NIGHT CLASSES, Part 1 ($5). There are also some art & pinup books she sells. The 128-page books have some extra short stories that weren't posted as webcomic pages to even out the page counts.

Quote from: terrence12 on January 16, 2017, 10:55:43 AM
a archie comedy drama series I find some other channels [/font][/size]that will allows the creators to have free will to their show and give reigns by being a showrunner throughout ,I will collaborate with writers and actors and every members of the rew until the series will truly be faithful to the archie comics source material whether it medium of best.And if it's good I'll let it keep on running maybe  for four season or when people get  bored of the series and then i am done by ending the series with a bang or whimper that's how i will make archie series with a proper technique and that's cooperation,teamwork and finding a proper channel thats lets you be in charge of the series during the rest of the run.

It's EASY to just say it, and if that's all it took then there would be a couple of dozen examples of TV show adaptations that you could point to and say, "You see? THEY did it right, and so can we! We all just need to pull together and cooperate as a team." But that's just a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, and doesn't reflect the way things really work in the entertainment industry. Virtually ALL of the people who succeed in that industry do so because they are shameless self-promoters who are looking for a stepping-stone for themselves to whatever they think the next thing for them will or should be. The whole business is ego-driven by people who want to be recognized and credited for whatever they do, and that's far more important to them than any ethereal concept like "faithfully adapted from the source material". That's how they survive in that business, by getting noticed by people, not by submerging themselves beneath someone else's "vision". The whole industry is super-competitive and out for themselves, and everyone's concept of what is going to make them look good (on the screen, or in their resume) and lead them on to bigger and better things, is different than yours. It's only the really minor people who just take orders and have no real input of their own to the production, and the higher you are on the food chain, the more power you have to mess with someone else's ideas of how things should be done. The writers have no real power to demand that things be done their way. They are paid to write what they're being TOLD to write, and that's it. And if someone doesn't agree with what they wrote... it WILL be changed, whether it's by the person who wrote it in the first place, or if he balks at the changes, someone else.

And on top of all that, the prevailing attitude is "Who cares? Nobody actually reads comic books anyway." The only reason they bother to even license something in the first place is a concept that they like to call PRE-SOLD AUDIENCE. That means that the audience may never have read an Archie comic book, but they have some nebulous idea of what it is, and that it IS a comic book. Or if they DO know the comics, and recognize how UNfaithfully the show has 'adapted' the source material, they will watch it anyway. Regardless of what they've heard, and how bad they may fear it will be, THEY WILL WATCH IT ANYWAY -- and in the end, that's the only real reason that the TV people are licensing the rights.

CRYING FREEMAN (OAV, 1988-1994) - 6 episodes (50 min. each)
SCOOBY-DOO: MASK OF THE BLUE FALCON (DTV movie, 2013) - 75 min. + 3 bonus episodes of Dynomutt (1976), 25 min. each
BEN 10, Season 1 (Cartoon Network, 2005) - 13 episodes (25 min. each)

{Moved here from another thread, where it was SERIOUSLY off-topic.}

Quote from: steveinthecity on January 16, 2017, 12:53:55 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 12, 2017, 04:20:39 AM

Quote from: apple on January 11, 2017, 09:06:47 PM
hm interesting how going against the norm, being different, and "going your own way" absolves you of all sexuality.

Like in language. We have words. That mean things. You can say you don't fit into any category all day long but in all honesty, you still actually do.

If Jughead had shown interest in girls none of you would be avoiding calling him straight just because weird people don't fit into labels. But whatever.

I think I already covered this in a post above, but he has shown interest in girls. But only in SOME stories. In others he's a "woman-hater", and other characters in the story specifically identify him by that label. I probably can't find a specific example to post here, or even more difficult to pin down, one where he identifies himself as a woman-hater (although it's certainly easy to find stories where he expresses his criticism of the female gender as a whole), but I can remember reading stories like that. The ones where he shows interest in girls are much easier to identify, and some of them are harder to quantify. One subject of debate revolves around Jughead's love relationship with January McAndrews, Marshall of the Time Police and a future descendant of Archie Andrews, which has raised a few eyebrows among people wondering just what exactly is going on there. There are even stories where Jughead dates Big Ethel and winds up having a good time. But it seems that in some stories he most definitely IS straight. Another good example of those would be LIFE WITH ARCHIE magazine (a.k.a. THE MARRIED LIFE in TP), where Jughead is married to Midge Klump.

Your argument doesn't fit or support the agenda.

In hindsight I find it fascinating to look back on the brief period beginning in 1987, when JUGHEAD was relaunched with a new issue #1 (August 1987), until about issue #38 (Oct.1992) - a period of about 5 years (which also included the short run of JUGHEAD'S TIME POLICE). During this short time frame, there was a lot of experimentation with the previous status quo of Jughead. He started dating, and there were a number of different women that were important in this period of his life were (besides January McAndrews over in TIME POLICE). In the very first issue, Jughead reminisces about Marci, who is referred to as "Jughead's very first groupie". In issue #5, things really begin getting stranger when a new Riverdale student, Debbie Dalton, shows up at school and all the boys are smitten by her. Even Jughead, who begins to obsess over her when he sees her talking to Archie and he's afraid that they're dating. However, it turns out that Debbie only has eyes for Jughead, and the feeling seems to be mutual, so they soon begin dating. Even Archie and Reggie begin to become envious of him. If that weren't enough, in that same issue, Juggie receives a letter from his very first friend in kindergarten, Joani Jumpp (who had a crush on him then, and still does), letting him know that she's moving back to Riverdale. When she arrives she immediately becomes jealous of Debbie, and a new "triangle wrangle" is born.



By issue #7 Jughead's image among teenage girls in Riverdale is beginning to change, in a story where the girls are hanging out at the beach, gossiping (mostly unfavorably) about Jughead. To refute their impression that Jughead is cheap and miserly, Betty tells a story about how Juggie spent his last $2 to buy some food for a couple of homeless kids, and to refute their impression that Jughead is the epitome of laziness, Midge tells the girls how Jughead stayed up all night cleaning the school to help an injured Mr. Svenson pass an important inspection. The girls insist that Jughead is the least model student at Riverdale, but when they compare notes they realize that Jughead has given several of them useful ways to ace their math homework. At first they grudgingly give him credit for all these things, but they still insist that he's a slob with no sense of style or fashion -- until fashion designer Coolvin Clean arrives in Riverdale, and spots Jughead and wants to copy his "individualist" look. All of a sudden the girls' impressions of Jughead start changing and they begin to think of him as a real sweetie, and good boyfriend material.



In issue #10 Jughead finds a genie in a bottle who offers to help him get to know girls without having to go on dates with them, so he's definitely spending more time thinking about girls. But when he winds up with two dates at the same time, Juggie decides to get rid of the genie as more trouble than he's worth. In another story in that same issue, Jughead finds a little girl lost in a snowstorm and helps her get home, earning a few kisses from the girl's older sister.



By issue #12, Jughead's former reputation among Riverdale's teenage girls has done an about-face:



Issue #14 contains a story with a rare appearance of January McAndrews outside of TIME POLICE, when she arrives to send Jughead on a mission to the past, and Joani Jumpp is also in the same story. Jan reappears in issue #18 (these appearances occurred in-between the first two Time Police stories in World of Jughead [ARCHIE GIANT SERIES] #590 & 602, and JUGHEAD'S TIME POLICE #1), and by now Jughead's romantic troubles have become even more complicated than Archie's. Things will become a little simpler for Jughead though, because this is Jan's last appearance in JUGHEAD, and Joani Jumpp announces that her family is moving from Riverdale again at the end of the story.



By issue #19, Jughead finally decides "I've Had It With Girls!" (responding, no doubt in this case, to the majority of readers' wishes).


That was only a brief respite though, because Jughead would soon begin seeing a woman psychoanalyst, Dr. Sara Bellum, and then become a skatepunk and get his head shaved in a bizarre pattern. He continued to attract new female interests like Sassy Thrasher and eventually began a new romantic relationship with Anita Chavita, a paraplegic black Latina girl -- which, in what can only be described as a bizarre twist, invoked a new mortal enemy in the form of normally mild-mannered, but now embittered, Dilton Doiley - who harbored a secret crush on Anita, and became obsessed with splitting the couple apart.


When this extended experimental phase finally ended, the title merely shifted (with about a gap of a year in which nothing particularly atypical for Jughead happened) into another change in status quo for Jughead. One that -- finally -- didn't involve any romance. In issue #50 a new female entered Jughead's life in the form of new baby sister Jellybean.


But just in case you thought Jughead's life was FINALLY free of all female entanglements, now that he'd left January, Debbie, Joani, Sassy and Anita behind him...
There was still Ethel. And Trula Twyst. ...and Bella Beazly, Wendy Weatherbee, Sadie Cameron, Sandy Sanchez, Toni Topaz, DiDi Diaz, and Sabrina...

Holly G's SCHOOL BITES: NIGHT CLASSES Part 1 - "Just Desserts" (digital) - Completed (after more than a year) back in 2014, this 22 page story is the final SB story has done to date (and also the only story she did that was printed as a floppy comic book). Doesn't look as though there will be any continuation at this point, I'm guessing. So many unresolved plot threads left hanging. It feels like the readers had barely gotten to know the large cast of characters, and it makes me wonder where (if she'd even planned it out that much in advance) Holly G thought she was heading with the story. She drew around 380 pages of this webcomic before abandoning it, and there's nothing like a real ending. Ah, well.

I'd like to see her reboot it as a regular print comic, and go for shorter, done-in-one-issue stories (although she could keep the connecting subplot threads), concentrating more on comedy situations. I think she was possibly overly ambitious with this series, and shouldn't have introduced so many new characters, and planted so many plot threads that never came to any sort of fruition - or maybe that's just the nature of an ongoing webcomic that posts new pages once or twice a week. I guess the fact that this last story, a 22-pager, took her so long to complete (where her earlier, and longer, stories had posted new pages far more frequently) was a big hint that she was running out of steam. SCHOOL BITES had been around as early as 2004 in a print digest format (I'm pretty sure it was initially a Kickstarter project) before having the first two printed stories (about 125 pages) serialized as a webcomic (3 times weekly) beginning in 2009, and after which she continued with new stories online (and later funded print versions of the webcomic pages again through Kickstarter). You could tell at one point she couldn't devote the time to it, because she began to frequently post sketches, pin-ups or 1-page gag strips (and even some of those were done by guest artists) instead of new pages of the current storyline, and even began an ongoing once-a-week 'backup feature' on Fridays called "Life With Prince Pangur Ban the Fluffy" (supposedly based on the real-life antics of her cat). Maybe she should have just slowed down and dropped the frequency of posting back, and not wasted her precious energy trying to draw pin-ups or gags, solely to maintain the relentless grind of a 3-times-weekly schedule. Apparently Prince Pangur Ban had his fans though, because that also went on to become a successful Kickstarter campaign that resulted in a collected print edition. It was cute, but I'd rather have seen more pages of SCHOOL BITES to move the story forward with all those plot threads.

Now see, I already spent a couple of hundred words talking about SCHOOL BITES without even giving one hint about the characters, storyline, or... anything, really. But it's weird because the comic has a lot of things I like, and a lot of things I don't like about it -- or rather, let's put it this way... there were some aspects of it that definitely need work and possibly a little re-thinking. I can't help but feel that some of those latter problems had a lot to do with the fact that it was being created as a webcomic though, as opposed to the normal sort of schedule that a writer/artist needs to maintain to create a regularly-published comic book.

And you might be asking what does Holly G do all day that she can't find the time to draw 3 finished pages of a webcomic in a week, since she isn't committed to drawing any other comics? Well, the answer there is that her "day job" is helping her husband, Jim Balent, run his little self-publishing comic book company, Broadsword Comics. Balent publishes his own title, TAROT: Witch of the Black Rose (not really my cup of tea, but just to put Holly's world in context here), and Holly is not only his wife, she's his VP of operations, which means she deals with the business and production end of running a one-comic-book publishing operation, while Jim spends the majority of his time doing the writing and drawing of TAROT (which is how the couple really pay their rent). Plus, of course, Holly has her own fanbase and takes on commission work for her own fans, and always seems to be putting together another Kickstarter project, some sort of ancilliary merchandising (prints, limited edition variant covers, buttons, magnets, stickers, etc.), either for TAROT or for SCHOOL BITES, and of course, they both maintain a heavy convention appearance schedule, because it's all about promotion, keeping in touch with their fans, and selling that ancilliary merchandise and getting new private commissions work. Ya gotta hustle to be a self-employed entrepreneur. Holly also maintains a bunch of other interests like cosplay, glamor photography, and burlesque. What I'm leading up to here though is that I think she put a lot of energy into promoting SCHOOL BITES at first, hoping that it would get a little more well-known, and thus generate a lot more income for the couple, but for whatever reason, when that didn't happen and it didn't really "take off", as it were, for her (she was doing it for ten years, believe it or not), she got a little burnt out on it, as I think the energy she was putting into it was taking more out of her than it was really worth. I think at one point she had hoped it might be optioned for animation or something. I can see why there weren't any takers, because it's not (in its current form) an all-ages property. It could be re-worked that way, or at least as a PG-rated thing, but maybe she isn't interested in doing it that way as a webcomic or a print comic. There's a few mild adult situations and some minor nudity, but that's about it. In its current form it would have to have a fairly narrow audience range, because it's reflective of Holly's tastes and not really "mainstream".

Anyway, I think what it is, is that for Holly to really focus her energy on SCHOOL BITES and address some of the weaknesses I mentioned, she'd need to be free to spend the majority of her time "in the zone" of creating that comic, which is what her husband needs to do to get TAROT (which is supporting the both of them) done on a timely basis and make it a consistent product. And he can only focus on that because he has her there to support him and do a lot of the grunt work of running a one-comic-book publishing operation. And it's equally true that she'd need someone to do all the same stuff for her that needs getting done, for her to really put the same level of energy into SCHOOL BITES and make that something that generates a living wage for her, but I don't think she can do it. It's kind of like a Catch-22 thing, where they'd need to be successful enough each on their own comics that they could afford to hire someone else to free up both of their time, knowing that all the important stuff was still getting done while the two of them were spending most of their time just writing and drawing comic books.

It was only a matter of time before Jughead entered the age of Digital Dipsy Doodles.