RICK AND MORTY: L'IL POOPY SUPERSTAR #5 (of 5)
RED TEAM: DOUBLE TAP # 5 (of 9)
EMPRESS #7 (of 7)
HELLBOY & THE B.P.R.D.: THE UNREASONING BEAST, Part 1 (of 2), or whole #13
ROM #5
MICKEY MOUSE #323
SIXPACK & DOGWELDER: HARD-TRAVELIN' HEROZ #4 (of 6)
BATMAN BEYOND #2
DETECTIVE COMICS #945
WONDER WOMAN #11
ACTION COMICS #968
TITANS #5
SUPERF*CKERS FOREVER #4 (of 5)
SCOOBY-DOO TEAM UP #20 (featuring Space Ghost)
SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU? #74
FUTURE QUEST #7
SUPER POWERS! #1 (of 6)
DARK HORSE PRESENTS #28
TRUE PATRIOT PRESENTS #1
KAIJUMAX SEASON 2 #6 (of 6)
GODZILLA: RAGE ACROSS TIME #5 (of 5)
KONG OF SKULL ISLAND # 5 (of 6)
ARCHIE COMICS SUPER SPECIAL #7

Quote from: SAGG on November 23, 2016, 04:26:26 AM
Bolling's no longer there? Man...

No one's been fired. It's just that nobody but Dan Parent is currently getting any new assignments to draw covers or stories in the classic Archie style. There may still be some unpublished stories by Bolling that haven't seen print yet. Since many of the stories have a seasonal background, they don't print summer-themed stories in the winter digest issues and vice-versa. If they have a bunch of unpublished summer stories that didn't get printed last summer, they have to wait until next summer to publish them, and there are a finite number of digest issues that come out in the appropriate months.

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.

Quote from: Ottawagrant on November 22, 2016, 08:08:45 PM
Digests are a good value for money. As I've mentioned before where I shop I can get 3 digest for $10. Canadian. That is cheaper than subscribing. That's why I personally don't mind when content gets reprinted in digest form. Not just classic Archie, but the 75th Anniversary content. A puzzle to myself is why they don't reprint entire issues in digest form. If a digest came on the market & the cover said 'Pep Comics #100 to 110' (for example), you could mark it as 'sold'. I think reprinting entire issues of classic Sabrina would be a good seller.

I think you have to consider that the main reader demographic for Archie digests is 8-12 year-old girls. Generally it's a point-of-purchase item for a parent on a shopping trip. While you and I and older readers would certainly love to see whole runs of some of the older classic titles reprinted, that's going to be meaningless to their main reader demographic. This also explains why the bulk of the stories reprinted in the digests are the more recent ones from the last couple of decades.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 20, 2016, 01:48:06 PM
Archie Comics Super Special #7 - not as many Christmas stories as I was hoping. Lots of snow stories.

I count 9 Christmas stories, which is pretty good relative to a double digest Xmas issue. That's not counting one-page gags and pin-up pages. You're right, there are a lot of "snow stories" as well. I was kind of happy to see that there was a good mix of older and newer stories in this, more older stories than would be the case with one of those double digest Xmas issues.

They could really enhance the desirability of these Super Specials by putting a new 20 (+/-) page lead story in each issue.

Quote from: SAGG on November 22, 2016, 02:31:14 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 21, 2016, 10:43:46 PM

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 21, 2016, 09:29:15 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 19, 2016, 08:22:27 PM
When you consider what he could be getting paid for his art by other publishers, he's got to be the biggest financial drain on ACP's resources of any of the artists working on the New Riverdale titles so far, who are all relative newcomers to the industry compared to Hughes, and IMO the costs to the company aren't worth the results. I think the relative sales on the B&V title bear that out as well.

B&V isn't selling well?

Compared to ARCHIE, no. I think they expected the first issue of B&V to do nearly as well (or dare they hope, better) than ARCHIE #1, and it fell far short of expectations. It seems like there are a bunch of people reading ARCHIE but not bothering with JUGHEAD or B&V or JOSIE. The quick reduction of REGGIE & ME from ongoing to 5-issue miniseries probably indicates that they've reached a market saturation point. It will be interesting to see what titles are still being published by the end of 2017.

What if ACP doesn't succeed on this, I wonder? Could this be the end of it? 

Well, there's RIVERDALE, so it remains to be seen how that does. My guess would be that regardless of whether the series and the comic book based on it does well or not, it's not going to affect sales of the New Riverdale comics one way or another. "Could this be the end of it?"...  Well, that depends on what "it" is in your query. New Riverdale comics will end eventually, one way or the other... it's just a question of how long.

The end of NR floppy comics wouldn't seem to affect sales of the digests and Super Specials reprinting classic Archie, either. They could certainly enhance those sales, making those titles appeal more to the older readers by offering more pages of new material in each issue. My guess would be that the Super Specials are purchased by a greater percentage of older readers than the digests, and that's where they should start, by making those magazine collections more attractive to older readers purchasing them for themselves by adding a new lead story (20 pages, +/-) in each of the quarterly issues. That would be by Dan Parent, since he's the sole classic Archie creator left.

WORLD OF ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #64 - This is the Christmas issue. It's a little light on Christmas stories. Nothing worth mentioning that I hadn't read before, anyway. The new lead is "Spinner Winner!" by Tom DeFalco and the Kennedys. It's only vaguely-justifiable as a Christmas story. It really fits more squarely into the "Archie the klutz" trope, but if you're going that route then there's no better choice of artists for the story but the Kennedys. You can always count on them for capturing those freeze-frame panels of hurtling bodies and objects, tumbling end-over-end, defying gravity. They just happen to be better at that than any other Archie artists, past or present.

There's the usual Double Digest mix of shorts in this issue, but there are only a couple of things worth commenting on. There is a 22-page SHE'S JOSIE section (that uses the old Fernando Ruiz title page from years ago). There are three 5-pagers and a 6-pager: "The Rescue!", "Dream Stuff", "Fiddle Faddle", and "All Unstrung". At first I was thinking these might all be from a single issue of JOSIE, but I guess not, since Albert has the longer hairstyle and guitar in the last story but not in the previous three. They might have just pulled the entire section from an older issue of WOADD, though. It was a nice surprise to me, in any case. (Hooray for PEPPER!)  There's also an 11-page sampling of stories from ARCHIE 3000 towards the back. (No LITTLE ARCHIE this time, yay!) There's also an 11-page Archie & Chuck sports story from ARCHIE AT RIVERDALE HIGH, interesting only for the fact that instead of the usual Betty & Veronica squabbling, we have Nancy & Veronica doing the plotting and scheming.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 21, 2016, 09:29:15 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 19, 2016, 08:22:27 PM
When you consider what he could be getting paid for his art by other publishers, he's got to be the biggest financial drain on ACP's resources of any of the artists working on the New Riverdale titles so far, who are all relative newcomers to the industry compared to Hughes, and IMO the costs to the company aren't worth the results. I think the relative sales on the B&V title bear that out as well.

B&V isn't selling well?

Compared to ARCHIE, no. I think they expected the first issue of B&V to do nearly as well (or dare they hope, better) than ARCHIE #1, and it fell far short of expectations. It seems like there are a bunch of people reading ARCHIE but not bothering with JUGHEAD or B&V or JOSIE. The quick reduction of REGGIE & ME from ongoing to 5-issue miniseries probably indicates that they've reached a market saturation point. It will be interesting to see what titles are still being published by the end of 2017.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 21, 2016, 09:19:02 PM
Yes but they don't make it very obvious on the covers that there's a new story inside.

There was a period of a few years there when they did use the cover to highlight a scene from the new lead story in the digests. That was (I believe) back when the line editor of the digests was Nelson Ribiero. Of course, back then the new lead stories were somewhere upwards of 10 pages to a full issue-length (for a floppy comic) story. You could tell that Ribiero cared about the digests and tried hard to make them interesting. Wish he was still editing them.

Nowadays the covers are all just generic/iconic images. Makes sense, I guess, since you can't really re-use a cover based on a 5-page story anywhere else, and ACP's all about recycling everything. I can't even remember the last time I saw a "gag" cover that's just a one-panel joke.

Quote from: steveinthecity on November 20, 2016, 08:17:39 PM

Quote from: Deb on November 20, 2016, 05:59:08 PM
Warning: Rant Ahead:
I have reached the jumping off point for the New Riverdale titles.  Betty and Veronica is a mess.  So much space in Issue #1 wasted on captions.  Our first view of Betty and Veronica on page 1 with them fighting is just awful as well.  Why on earth did Hot Dog narrate the story?  Why replace two pages of the story with more caption balloons and a pic of Betty and Veronica in bikinis for no reason? 
Off-topic, but Archie's storyline is just dragging on and becoming more and more unpleasant, between Cheryl Blossom's introduction and Archie's eating himself into the hospital.  Then we get a preview for the previous issue of Jughead instead of a classic reprint.  Jughead has been fun, but I get the sneaky fekeling that it isn't selling very well.  While fun, I just can't bring myself to start reading the Josie reboot.  I just get the feeling it'll end suddenly, like Life With Archie did, or be dropped to be replaced with a Riverdale comic (which is coming).  The 75th Anniversary Digests are a big rip-off, just reusing stories from the 75th Anniversary book and Best of Books (which may or may not eventually become Deluxe hardcovers anyways, so maybe I'll just wait). If the Super Specials keep up, I'll happily read them and Dark Horse's Archie Archives paperbacks, but honestly, it's hard not to be frustrated with Archie Comics right now.
End of Rant.

You're my pick for  "favorite poster" of the month. 

Quote from: DeCarloRules...snip...

I like when we argue over stuff we've formed a similar opinion on.


DCR's successfully using "vagaries" in a reply and being the incumbent will certainly make this a tough challenge for Deb, though.

Oh, is THAT what we were doing, arguing? Well, I guess I've botched it, then. I was under the impression we were just discussing. Or commenting. Something like that, anyway.

I'd just like to add that I'm in complete agreement with every rant that Deb just ranted (well, almost... but since I haven't been reading ARCHIE, I'm willing to trust her on that one), especially as she summarized nicely how it makes me feel, in her final sentence, that I was emboldened to.. well, embolden. Personally, I generally don't bother to label my rants as such, but just assume that people would know that if they've read many of my prior posts.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 07:59:41 PM
Jughead I'm not that into since Sabrina's gone but I'll probably still read it. Same for Reggie. I will read it but not buy it.

Same here. Even with the same creative team as for issues #9-11 (the ones guest-starring Sabrina), I'm just not as interested any more. The two issues that preceded Sabrina (#7-8) looked good art-wise but the story was dull. I don't have all that much interest in Reggie as a solo star of his own series, but I'm curious to read it more for the fact that Tom DeFalco is writing it than for any other reason.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 07:59:41 PMI could've sworn there was a Riverdale one shot with a whole bunch of other covers. What happened to that? Is this new Riverdale a miniseries or ongoing?

It's the first issue of an ongoing series, and it says so in the solicitation copy. Which would presumably make the other #1 (the one that has a Dan Parent variant cover, among others) from last month's solicitations just a one-shot special. No idea as far as what might be the difference in contents. I'll take a wild stab at it and guess that the one-shot special's contents are a hastily-thrown-together mishmosh of excerpts of scenes from previously-released New Riverdale comic book issues.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 07:59:41 PMYay. Return of the Super Special Magazine. Hopefully they will have more themed ones like Christmas.

Super Special was originally a quarterly, and ALL of the issues were seasonally-themed. Besides the Christmas issue, there was one for Valentines Day/Spring, Summer, and Fall. If you check past issues, you'll see the season's name highlighted somewhere on the cover. Here's hoping that ACSS resumes the quarterly schedule, but this new cover for ACSS #8 doesn't seem seasonally-themed in any way. Maybe they're hedging their bets in case there's a delay in shipping this one on time, because one of the problems with a seasonally-themed quarterly was that if it doesn't come out ON TIME, then the season-geared contents are useless.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 07:59:41 PMThe Josie 80 pager I'll get just because it's Josie even though they are reprinting the first appearance AGAIN...grrr.

Yes, it gets a little tedious that it sometimes seems like the only Josie story that ever gets spotlighted is the first appearance of the Pussycats, just as it gets a little annoying that if there's a Sabrina reprint somewhere outside of the B&V digests, odds are that it will be that first Sabrina story from MADHOUSE #22.

BUT, did you notice THIS in the solicitation copy?? >> "Starting with their first appearances and going in chronological order" <<  Of course by "their" they mean the Pussycats, not "Josie and Friends", so that would mean all of the stories that followed chronologically after the initial formation of the Pussycats. Still pretty good, and worth having that first story again now, if it's appearing at the beginning of a chronological reprint.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 07:59:41 PMAs far as digests, I'll probably stick to Betty and Veronica. Maybe WOA if it has a lot of snow/wintery themed stories.

I wonder when these brand new lead stories will run out? How many more are left? When does ACP plan to stop publishing brand new Classic Archie stories and possibly the digests as well?

Yeah, I think what happened there where they're suddenly practically shouting the fact that all of the digests have a NEW LEAD STORY, is that they realized that the generic solicitation copy that they usually use for any kind of reprint book wasn't doing any good for selling digests to anybody. The majority of their 8-12 year old readers are probably not (or only vaguely) aware of which stories are new, and the parents buying them for them certainly don't care, and aren't reading any solicitations for upcoming comics in the first place. The ONLY people who care whether the digests have new stories are the older fans who buy them online or through comic shops, or digitally, and they're the ONLY ones besides retailers reading the solicitations.

Catching up on some Pixie Trix webcomics. Reading DANGEROUSLY CHLOE Vol. 2 (Chapters 11-16) right now on the computer (I save them all first to  make it easier to read -- I figure it's worth the extra time/work to save it before reading it, because I'll probably want to re-read it again sometime), and ASTRO BOY (1960-61 stories) in paperback. After I finish those stories I'll have to see if I can get caught up on other Pixie Trix comics I haven't read in months, like EERIE CUTIES and MAGICK CHICKS, and maybe save all of Kristin Gudsnuk's HENCHGIRL webcomics and re-read the whole thing (it concluded with the 10th issue of the print comic). I kind of like waiting a few months until I can save complete chapters of the webcomic series. I just enjoy it more that way than checking it every few weeks just to read a few pages.

Sure wish there would be a new print issue of Darin Henry and Jeff Schultz' SUPER SUCKERS soon.

Quote from: steveinthecity on November 19, 2016, 09:23:39 PM
I don't understand the story as a long time reader, and equally I don't understand why a New reader would be interested in this. Too many questions as your original post puts forth, which is why I want to re-read both issues back to back.

That's why I had to ask all those questions. The book SHOULD be immediately accessible to both newcomer and veteran ACP fans alike, but so many vagaries in the information supplied on the pages of the comic led me to wonder whether the book had been written from the standpoint of assuming that any reader would have already been familiar with anything previously established in the New Riverdale ARCHIE title. That would still have been a failing, but apparently that's not the case either, which makes B&V an even bigger Fail from a storytelling perspective. Before the title even came out, I joked about Hughes filling 20 pages or so with cheesecake pin-up panels of B&V, but in hindsight that would have represented a major improvement here in the art helping to compensate for a vapid story.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 08:06:58 PM
Hopefully the designs aren't too intricate and they still to the Classic Archie style. Archie comics never was too detailed.

If you'd seen what some of the pages of that Disney Villains Coloring Book looked like, you'd be nervous about that solicitation copy that says "each image has an intricate background pattern to add to your color experience". That thing looks awful. I'd show you, only we can't access the galleries to upload images right now. Here's a video where a guy does a page-through of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBvhDv1VjX0. Archie Comics aren't supposed to be "intricate", so if Archie's Coloring Book turns out looking anything like the Disney one, I'll be majorly disappointed, and won't hesitate to post a critical review on Amazon warning people away. IMO the coloring book should just feature b&w line-art of classic iconic cover images and pin-up pages.

Quote from: irishmoxie on November 19, 2016, 08:06:58 PM
Reggie 80 pager you can still pre-order on Comixology and Amazon. Due out 11/30. Maybe they just made it digital only.

It is to laugh. So it goes from a Digital Exclusive miniseries in 2006 to a Digital-Only collection in 2016?

I don't know... what do you think it means, that the solicitation copy for the digests had (for the past six months or so prior to the solicitations for January) become ambiguous about whether or not the issue contained a NEW lead story, or was at least soft-pedalling the use of the word "new"... but NOW they're making it very clear, practically trumpeting the fact loud and clear that the digests all have new lead stories? Do you think that indicates "the last hurrah" before they discontinue new stories in the digests? Maybe, but it seems to me the opposite, that they seem to recognize that as a major selling point in writing the solicitation copy. Desperate to be noticed because of slipping sales? As far as "running out" of new stories goes, well they'll run out whenever they stop telling Dan Parent to write & draw new 5-pagers. He can easily handle the 20 pages a month or so required to supply the six titles with new 5-page lead stories. Their inventory of older, non-DP unpublished stories must be getting pretty thin at this point.