Just curious as to how you're picking these, SAGG. I can't see any particular patterns or anything. Are these just stories you found somewhere, or are you scanning them all yourself from your personal collection, or are they from an already-digital collection? What's your criteria for selection? Particular artists, writers, characters...? Or is it just a more-or-less "I liked this one" kind of thing?

Quote from: BettyReggie on November 26, 2016, 08:29:59 PM
In this series, I only think Reggie got the dog because he was sad & lonely. He is only interested in Midge . Vadar actually says Reggie could have his choice of any girl but Reggie only wants Midge.

Vadar is another talking dog like Hot Dog in B&V?

ASTRO BOY - "The White-Hot Being", "Plant People", "The Hot Dog Corps", "The Blast Furnace Mystery", "The Third Magician" (all stories from 1961)

JUGHEAD'S DOUBLE DIGEST #70 (Oct. 2000) - Not much to say about this one, except that this issue had not one, not two, but three of those 1-page "KNOW YOUR HEROES!" 1 or 2 page features that ran randomly as fillers in both floppy and digest comics between 1999 and 2002, all of them written by Paul Castiglia: "The Legacy of The Black Hood", "The Origin of The Jaguar", and "The Origin of Steel Sterling". I've rarely seen even 2 of these in a single comic, and here there are three of them. I've been able to identify 10 different instances of this feature (a few of which were in the form of Public Service Announcements about Bicycle Safety, In-Line Skating Safety, or Fire Safety; the rest were origin story recaps of the various MLJ heroes: Black Hood, Black Jack, Mr. Justice, The Shield, Steel Sterling, The Comet, The Jaguar, and The Web).

Quote from: BettyReggie on November 26, 2016, 05:49:16 PM
Vader, who is Reggie's dog is me in the comic. Its sweet how Reggie got the dog. Jughead was playing with Hot Dog & that made Reggie want to get a dog. Jughead seemed Happy that Hot Dog & Jughead were so happy together. Reggie was lonely & wanted a friend.

Did he get a dog just because it would help him meet cute girls? That's the way he got Runty (from an animal shelter) in the other (digital exclusive) REGGIE AND ME miniseries.

These hardcover books.

 

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on November 25, 2016, 05:42:09 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 24, 2016, 12:08:03 AM

She's a Tom DeFalco creation.

Well sort of...


I think I've told this story before... Archie Comics president Mike Pellerito was obsessed with bringing diversity to the Riverdale cast who he constantly described as being "too lily white." A noble enough sentiment, but he often urged us to shoe-horn Chuck and Nanci into stories and cover gags where they really served no purpose other than to be "the black friend." There were quite a few covers I'd drawn where Pellerito's only response would be, "Could you put Chuck in there?"


Eventually Pellerito decided that Chuck and Nanci were pretty boring and ordered a moratorium on his previous unspoken standing decree that they be included on every cover. He also determined that Riverdale needed new exciting minorities. From this sprang Trev and Toni Topaz.


I wasn't there for Trev, but I was in the office the day Toni Topaz was created by committee by the entire art department. You should've heard some of the other names being suggested for the character! I wish I could remember them, but I do recall they all sounded like we were naming the first stripper in Riverdale. Since I was right there in the office, I was asked to draw a few sketches of this new character. I had a magazine with me with a picture of the singer, Rihannain it. In the picture, she was wearing a hat. This became my inspiration for Toni. I forget if I decided to give her the pink hair or if someone else did.


Toni was put into that first Jughead story and almost immediately afterwards, Archie Comics went into one of its recent big money crunches. As a result, the digests saw a huge cutback in new material. Toni continued to appear on almost all of the digest covers but by that point, she'd appeared in only one or two stories. Most readers' responses to her were, "Who's THAT?"

This kind of behind-the-curtain stuff is fascinating, Fernando. I thought Trev was part of the "New Kids" initiative, which included many new ethnically-diverse characters, or maybe he came about even earlier, as part of Dan Parent's "Archie Marries Valerie" storyline. Maybe Dan would know more about the genesis of those characters. I'll have to ask him sometime.

Quote from: SAGG on November 25, 2016, 08:12:00 PM

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on November 25, 2016, 06:13:39 PM

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 25, 2016, 05:55:56 PM

More stories like this!! Fernando, you need to write an autobiography.

These days I post most of my Archie stories and commentaries over at my own blog. Please check over there for my behind the scenes accounts.


http://fernandoruizeverybody.com

I keep threatening to write a lengthy telling about my time on Life With Archie. One of these days when I get a little time, I'm going to sit down and do it.

I've scaled back my posts on this board simply because as Archie Comics retreats further and further into my past, I have less to offer on it. I certainly have made my feelings concerning Archie Comics' current direction known. What else is left to say? Still, I do check back from time to time so if anyone has questions for me specifically, I'll answer as best I can.

I've got two: What if ACP wanted to change the direction of Archie like they have now, but wanted to keep you Classic artists? Would you have any trouble doing what they wanted, or would you have felt uncomfortable with the change? What if they wanted you to change your artwork as well to match the change in the story retro-wise, something more "serious-looking"? 

You're probably ignoring a big thing here, which is the publicity buzz they get from radical sweeping changes like a complete overhaul of creative personnel. Just changing the style isn't enough for them to get noticed by the comics news hype sources, unless they completely toss everything out the window.

The problem with ACP is that all of the big decisions are all generated by top-down thinking (management issuing marching orders), and they didn't seem to encourage a lot of ideas for new directions and change from the (formerly-)existing creative staff. Then again, even when there was some positive action like mandates for creating new characters and diversifying ethnicity, there was never any real follow-through, as Fernando's story about Toni Topaz illustrates (and the same applies to the New Kids, as well).

Fernando has done some commission art in the 'New Riverdale' makeover style, which he has posted on his blog page. If you look at some of the artwork posted in his portfolio there, you'll see that he's quite adept at drawing "serious-looking" characters, so that would never have been an issue.

For me personally, the branding of the characters and their specific personalities are largely meaningless outside of the context of cartoon style and situation comedy. ACP recognized this as their main selling point in the 1950s when they affixed the following tag line to the bottoms of some pages:

You can certainly add layers of characterization or subtext to the stories on top of that, but THAT is the core, the raison d'etre, for Archie Comics in the first place.

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on November 25, 2016, 05:27:45 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 25, 2016, 12:37:50 AM

His original contract was for three issues.

I'd heard four.

I'd heard three, but you might be right about that. Three sounds like an unusually small number of issues, but I didn't question it because I was still wondering how a cash-poor (before contracting independent financing) comics publisher like ACP could afford to hire Adam Hughes in the first place. I guess we'll know one way or the other when issue #3 comes out, if it's the conclusion of the B vs V story or not.

EDITed my earlier post [http://www.archiefans.com/reviews/some-reviews/?message=7383] on ARCHIE COMICS SUPER SPECIAL #7 to include contents listing and brief comments.

Since I've been seeing the ads for this in the digests, I decided to check it out.
http://www.bettyandveronica.com/



It's a fairly pricey collection, so obviously aimed more at the Veronicas out there than the Bettys. I'd be interested in getting the women's reaction on these. Which of these do you like or would you wear (leaving aside the question of whether you can afford to dole out this much cash on your wardrobe collection)?

And what's with the two differently-colored shoes? Is that an actual thing now? It sounds like the plot of an Archie Comics story -- or at least I remember one where Betty (or was it Veronica?) started a new fad at Riverdale High by accidentally wearing two mismatched socks to school one morning.

In other news --

• There's a Black Friday sale beginning at http://archiecomics.com/. Use codeword FRIDAY for 40% off and fill in some holes in your collection with stuff you might not have considered buying at full price.


• RIVERDALE has a premiere date of Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 9pm on "the" CW. (I never was clear on what that stood for, so maybe someone could clear that up for me, and why is it the only cable network that requires a definite article "the"?) That pilot episode should be worth a couple of threads worth of commentary for the forums.

As we were discussing the indexing of stories by theme in another thread, it occurs to me that they could never have foreseen the need to sort stories quite this specifically in the pre-digital era. While stories from the DE collections "Lifeguards on Duty" and "Just Keep Swimming" could easily have found their way into a "Summer Fun" reprint collection issue, they would never have considered putting out something like a reprint comic composed of all Thanksgiving stories. Some of those stories might easily be included in digest issues shipping in late October or early November, but the thought of filling an entire digest issue with them would not even be seriously considered. It's only the constant need to generate new DE thematic collections (to differentiate them from a standard digest assortment of stories) that leads to a need for indexing the plot content of the stories in the first place.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 24, 2016, 03:07:12 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 24, 2016, 12:00:56 AM

Quote from: BettyReggie on November 23, 2016, 07:50:54 PM
I'm  just so upset that this comic is coming out so slowly. What's going on? Too many delays. Do you they will change the artist soon?

#3 is the last issue for Adam Hughes.

Rumor or truth? Who's the next artist?

Adam Hughes is an expensive talent to hire for ACP. His original contract was for three issues. I can't see that being renewed unless the book sold phenomenally well beyond expectations (and Hughes probably has a limited window of availability between his other paying assignments). There's been no announcement to date of who will follow as the new creative team on B&V, but at the rate the issues have been coming out, there's still plenty of time for them to hype a new creative team for #4. They probably knew he was going to be slow to deliver a completed issue, but they're balancing that against the marquee value of Adam Hughes' name as a main attraction. They'll need to put the book out more frequently if they're going to generate more profit, but they obviously wanted to create buzz by launching the title with a big name.

I can't tell you what comes next, but I can point you at a look at "What Might Have Been"...
http://www.adistantsoil.com/2011/09/27/m-unpublished-betty-and-veronica-art-for-archie-comics/

Quote from: steveinthecity on November 24, 2016, 04:48:02 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 23, 2016, 06:21:34 AM

Quote from: steveinthecity on November 22, 2016, 11:37:59 PM
To previously echo previous thoughts, I don't believe ACP ever really archived stories based on title or subject until more recent years when editors where being called upon to provide such material.

In the past, they did maintain a library of bound volumes of the printed comics, at least up to the early 1990s, that went back to the very beginning of their publishing history. I couldn't say whether or not anyone had ever bothered to index those stories by keywords or themes or story elements or characters in any way. That would probably have been a labor-intensive project in itself. But the library was there for editors to use in looking for stories to reprint.

Did I imply ACP didn't maintain any archive?      Not my intent if my post came across that way.


The quick sources for my comment originated from old posts from Suzanimated (former Digest Editor) and forsythe.  Susanna had described there wasn't much done in the way of organization by theme and such for several decades.  Forsythe as we know has a much larger archive of Archie related material than ACP itself, and provides scans, photos, etc. to books being produced because the ACP archive is full of "holes" (Not meant as slight towards them) and similarly echoed Suzanimated's comments.

I don't know that I ever suggested there was no library for editors to use as reference material.

Just pointing out that such an indexing project, even if undertaken circa the early 1990s, might have required an unjustifiable amount of man-hours, and kept a team of research assistants (or assistant editors, or interns... I don't know if ACP ever had interns) busy for several years. Although such a database would undoubtedly prove useful to editors in the future, ACP didn't have any sort of vested interest in continuity the way Marvel and DC did (where a lot of the work might have been accomplished before even starting, based on a fanbase of knowledge). Michael L. Fleisher's (DC) Encylopedia of Super-Heroes comes to mind here...  At any rate, before the relatively modern concept of trade paperback collections, such precision in the selection of stories for digests was hardly required. It was probably more important just to try to keep track of how often a particular story was reprinted (although... they don't seem awfully concerned about that today).

Prior to a decade or so ago, it must have seemed quite simple. You'd know where to look to find Archie stories, Josie stories, Jughead stories, Betty & Veronica stories, Reggie, Mr. Weatherbee, or Moose stories. You'd know where to look to find 1-page, 2-page, and 1/2-page gag fillers (primarily the JOKE BOOKs). You could find seasonal stories simply by following the cover dates, and the only 'themes' that mattered were "Christmas" and "Summer Fun" (again, just check the cover dates). There rarely was any occasion to locate specific things like minor supporting character appearances or "that one story where Archie translated Spanish", or "all the stories built around the gag of Smithers bodily ejecting Archie from the Lodge mansion". Even when they finally did get to trade collections in the 1990s with THE BEST OF THE FORTIES... well, that was ONE decade's worth of comics to sift through. At the rate those books were coming out, they had plenty of time to do them.

If I had to guess, I'd bet when they got stuck trying to find anything in the library, they'd just consult Victor Gorelick. He'd been with the company in one capacity or another since (IIRC) 1957, so he probably had a pretty good feel for that kind of stuff.

That said, now that they're digitizing stuff, they should be doing that kind of indexing as part of the process...

Quote from: PTF on November 23, 2016, 03:01:26 PM
Toni Topaz. She is the most popular unpopular character I've ever seen!!

She's a Tom DeFalco creation. She's got tons of untapped potential, as demonstrated in her introductory story in Jughead Double Digest #176. Also one of the few black female characters (apart from Nancy Woods and Valerie of the Pussycats) in the ACP universe, but even in just a measly few appearances, her unique character is already better-defined than Nancy or Valerie. Mostly she just seems to get included on covers a lot because of her eye-catching character design, with magenta hair and candy-colored fashions.

Quote from: BettyReggie on November 23, 2016, 07:50:54 PM
I'm  just so upset that this comic is coming out so slowly. What's going on? Too many delays. Do you they will change the artist soon?

#3 is the last issue for Adam Hughes.