Quote from: Captain Jetpack on January 08, 2019, 08:45:46 AM
Years ago there were a series of tattoo-style art prints of the various ladies from Archie.
Dan Parent did, em, I think.

I wanted to buy them then, but was distracted by...a shiny thing. 


Anybody know where I can get them?


If individual pieces, Sabrina, Betty or Veronica, preferred, in that order.

I have them, but I don't see them listed any more on the Store page at danparent.com. You could drop by there and contact him (it's in the menu) and ask if he still has a few left, or might be considering doing a new printing of those print designs at some point. There was a Josie "tattoo" print design also, by the way. 11"x17" prints go for $20 each, plus $3 shipping. As far as I know, Dan himself is the only person authorized to sell those. I don't even know if authorized is the right word here... it might be more of a "ACP agrees to look the other way as long as you don't piss us off" kind of thing. Heck, I don't know if he has a deal with some local printer to print them in batches, or even if he's got himself a nice printer at home that can crank out copies of any image files he has on a one-at-a-time basis. Doesn't hurt to ask.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 11, 2019, 11:41:03 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 11, 2019, 05:39:00 AM
Plus you don't worry about whether any particular store is stocking the titles you like, or whether or not they'll be sold out before you get there.

This was actually a problem when I was ordering physical comics online from TFAW. If I waited a week or two after an issue came out in order to order multiple titles together and save on shipping, well, there was a chance that that title would no longer be available, so I was forced to order single issues weekly and pay for shipping each time.

The system of print comic book distribution has evolved to a pattern of pre-orders setting *VERY* tight margins on the number of copies of any particular item that the distributor carries. There are so many hundreds of items listed each and every month in the Diamond Previews catalog, that any significant percentage of overstocking on items that don't have "shelf life" results in Diamond Comics' warehouses clogging up with unsold (and in most cases, nearly unSELLable) items. I even have direct access to my LCS' Diamond ordering system, and I can tell you that in any given week there are any number of items which will ship SOLD OUT -- that means they can't even be re-ordered on the day that they're supposed to go on sale -- if you didn't get your advance order in before the cutoff date, you're out of luck. Diamond is ordering in quantities from the publishers extremely close to the actual initial order numbers submitted by retailers. Diamond wants most of their deliveries from printers to go out the door of their warehouses the same week. A few really BIG online retailers might have special deals with individual publishers (like  TFAW is owned by Mike Richardson, publisher of Dark Horse Comics), but most of their product is still coming from Diamond, so if you don't pre-order before the cutoff date for the retailer to submit his orders to Diamond, there are no guarantees you'll actually get the product.

All of this makes me think that the monthly floppy print comic book has really outlived its original purpose. In order for the comics medium to reach and expand its audience, the comics industry needs to revert to the newspaper model. Instead of comics being sold ala carte, they should be initially digital-only, and free (to view, but not to download or save) or bundled into a single low monthly subscription fee. They shouldn't even become print comics until there is a proven audience demand for the product, and then only in more substantial collected editions. That's counter-intuitive to the way just about everyone in the industry thinks though, most especially the retailers. The weekly Wednesday Warriors who buy between 10 and 40 or so floppy single comics every single week with clockwork regularity are what most retailers have courted for the last 40 years in the direct market, and that's what they use as a yardstick to gauge their weekly income (as well as planning their monthly orders). Unfortunately the collector mentality has ruined the economic viability of comics as a medium for everyone else.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 10, 2019, 10:15:22 PM
I was paying a lot in shipping for physical comics, because there are no physical comic shops near me and haven't been in years (the only one that comes up in a search is 18 miles away, in the next county). So I quit physical comics in December of 2016, switched to digital, and haven't looked back.
As for the price of digital comics, well, I think $3.99 is a bit too much, regardless of whether it's digital or physical. But does anyone know how much that Archie pays the writers, artists, and letterers per issue? The $3.99 price might make some sense in terms of a way to recoup costs.
For me, it's always more convenient to read something digitally, because I'm constantly parked in front of my computer until my mom goes to bed, so it's just a matter of opening it up in my Kindle for PC program.

Quote from: SAGG on January 11, 2019, 05:02:44 AM
Digital all the way, save for a collection of some Archies done by DeCarlo, Lucey, Schwartz via Amazon...

Distribution is the absolute critical factor for a large number of people. For print comics, if you don't have a local comic shop, you don't have distribution -- except via the internet. But if that's the way you have to go, then why not just click on a button and download a comic rather than waiting (and paying) for delivery of the physical item? Plus you don't worry about whether any particular store is stocking the titles you like, or whether or not they'll be sold out before you get there. I worked out solutions to all those worries decades ago, so the distribution issue barely impacts me (except when a title is sold out at the distributor level). Having said that, if my LCS retailer was to go out of business right now, I'd probably go the internet route rather than finding another local store, and at least part of that would be digital... although it would probably result in my going almost totally to collected editions rather than single issues (I'm sure there would always be a few exceptions, though).

But I totally understand that people don't want to deal with the limitations in distribution of print comics, plus the storage and "collecting" aspects of that. They just want to READ the comics. For me, I spend all DAY in front of the computer at work, and a fair amount of time at home on the computer as well, so I'm looking for a way to get UN-ball-&-chained from the PC. Even a tablet is a little more hassle than I want. The screen's not big enough. I'm always afraid I'm going to drop the thing. Is it convenient to plug it in where I'm sitting, or do I have to check to see how much battery life I've got left? Ultimately the most convenient place to use the tablet is lying in bed. Maybe I just need a bigger screen tablet with a more robust battery, and some kind of sling or tether to keep me from accidentally dropping the thing. I wish digital comics were in the landscape page format, or desktop monitors would just swivel to display in portrait mode (yes, I realize you can buy such things, but they're expensive because almost nobody uses them).

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 10, 2019, 08:59:18 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 10, 2019, 04:32:27 AM
I have a huge backlog of comics (and other stuff) to READ at any given time (plus stuff I'd love to RE-read again, that I first read years ago, if I can find the time), so my time is increasingly dominated by reading as opposed to viewing.

I haven't been much of a reader (of books) historically, but, last year, I decided to start reading ebooks, and I've been keeping track of my progress on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13874241-mark
Usually, I read 2-3 books at a time but only a chapter of each per day.
As for comics, I gave away a ton of unread non-Archie comics to a thrift store yesterday. If I ever feel like reading comics, I just buy the Kindle version (and it's usually an Archie).

I don't know what it is about digital comics, but if there's a print comic and a digital comic of the same thing at the same price I'll go for the print comic every single time. They're just a lot more convenient to read (although they do take up a lot more space). That said, I'm always on the lookout for digital comics that can't be had (at least not easily or cheaply) in print. Loosely translated, what that mostly means for me is OLD comics; comics that are now public domain that someone scanned and uploaded to sites like Digital Comic Museum or ComicBookPlus, or fan-translated scans (scanslations) of Japanese manga which the regular American print publishers have chosen NOT to translate. Or webcomics that can be saved by right-clicking the images. AND of course, what all those things have in common is that they're FREE. I might feel differently about 'regular' digital comics if they were cheaper, like maybe $1 for a 20-page story. I mean, I can see why print comics cost $4 for a single floppy. They're printed on decent paper, but they don't print a hell of a lot of them, so I can see where the money's going. Most people only think about what the writers, artists, editors, production people and the publisher need to charge to make a living... but with print comics, a large part of that $4 cover price is keeping a printer, a distributor, and a retailer in business. What's digital's excuse? It literally costs NOTHING to make as many copies as they can sell. There are NO material costs beyond the cost of initial production, no paper, ink, shipping costs, etc. Maybe they'd sell more if they weren't so profit-greedy. Yet at the same time, if they make them TOO cheap, then they're stabbing the print end of their publishing operation right through the heart. I say digital comics won't really be practical until they don't compete directly with print comics, nor do I want to contribute to the death of print comics, so I guess it's print for me, as long as it still exists.

SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH #45 (May 1978)
SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH #50 (Dec 1978)
BETTY AND VERONICA #294 (June 1980) - Not much to say about these. Some random (but good) old issues. I think I'd read most of these stories in reprints somewhere in the digests before.

GIANT GRAB BAG COMICS (Dec. 1975) - Truth in advertising. What they did was, they took 5 random issues of unsold Archie Comics dated Sept. or Oct. 1975, side-stapled them together, glued on a cardboard cover, and trimmed the edges. All the interior pages (including ads and editorial pages) are just the same as the individual comics; the only thing missing are the original covers. And they (a company calling itself "Modern Promotions", with a New York City address) sold this thing (which was essentially a cheap, early example of a trade paperback) for $1.25. Or tried to, anyway. There were four different title/cover variations on this idea (all of which contained randomly-selected, unsold issues of Archie Comics), at least one of which was offered the following year with a 98c cover price. 25c would have been the cover price of the individual comics in 1975, so stapling 5 together for $1.25 amounted to no discount whatsoever as opposed to buying 5 Archie Comics individually. My particular copy of this book contained the following issues: ARCHIE'S T.V. LAUGH-OUT #34, REGGIE'S WISE-GUY JOKES #35, EVERYTHING'S ARCHIE #42, MADHOUSE #99, and ARCHIE AT RIVERDALE HIGH #28.





BETTY AND ME TP - I'll keep this short and sweet. Unless you don't particularly care for Betty as a character, or for some reason don't particularly like stories by Frank Doyle & Dan DeCarlo, you should buy this trade collection. There are 36 stories here from 1966-1972 issues of BETTY AND ME, and out of those, 27 of the stories have artwork by Dan DeCarlo (and most of those were written by Frank Doyle). Of the remaining 9 non-DeCarlo stories, 4 were drawn by Bob Bolling, and 4 were drawn by Al Hartley (with a single story drawn by Samm Schwartz). IMO this is the single best volume they've done so far in the "Archie Comics Presents ..." trade paperback series. As expected by now, this does NOT reprint ALL the stories from consecutive early issues of BETTY AND ME, it's more of a "best of" collection. Included is "Heroes Are Made" from BETTY AND ME #18, which if I'm not mistaken, is actually the first comic book appearance of Hot Dog (the issue was on sale right around the time The Archie Show premiered in 1968), notable because in this story Hot Dog is Archie's dog, not Jughead's. I think one or two other stories where Hot Dog is Archie's dog got published before they decided that HD actually belonged to Jughead.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 09, 2019, 04:40:23 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on January 09, 2019, 11:23:33 AM
You might be the odd man out on this opinion. I always assumed people wanted MORE episodes of series that they liked, not less. It may just be that you have a heavy schedule with too much TV viewing on your plate.

That's not really the reason. Well, it's part of it. It's more like I have so little free time that I have a backlog of DVDs and Blu-rays to watch - and anything interesting that I find on Netflix on top of that. I have a job, and I live with my 78-year-old mom, who deals with constant pain (and constantly makes me aware of it) and is rather dumb when it comes to technology - and who also feels I have to take up the rather pointless tasks of doing yard work now that she she no longer can (the only times that I even go outside are to check the mail, so I really don't see the point, but that's unacceptable to her). Plus, she generally parks herself on the living room couch all day and either Skypes with relatives, plays sound-effect-laden computer games, or watches her endless supply of cop shows, leaving me only about a couple hours in the evening to get any kind of viewing in.

Also, I read an article a few months ago that said the trend for millennials and younger is to watch content usually not much longer than 20 minutes in length (often, this is content created by their peers and shared on YouTube), so a 22-episode (or more) season of 40-minute episodes is too much by comparison. (Heck, I myself take a few days to watch one movie.)

Also, I recently got into a discussion on the Supergirl TV Reddit, and the feeling is a 22-episode season is too much, and it's made even worse by constantly going on hiatus, which makes people forget plot details and even entire characters (I watch reaction videos, and the reactors are often confused for a while as to who certain people are supposed to be). I had suggested either a shorter season or multiple mini-story arcs per season (or even - gasp! - stand-alone episodes that have nothing to do with anything else), but the response that I got was this would come off as a foreign concept to the network.
Heck, the reason that Riverdale's ratings went up from season 1 to season 2 is due to new, younger viewers discovering the series on Netflix (it went up the week after the season finale, I believe) and binge-watching it.
Personally, it took me two years to "binge-watch" the entire Star Trek franchise and a few months to do "Charmed". Between my weekly blog, fanfics, watching YouTube videos, and trying to get some original novels done, I simply can't spare an entire day to watch an entire season of a series.

Yes, and I agree with the people who say "something 20-ish minutes or so on YouTube". Which is why I rarely get anywhere beyond YouTube - the occasional DVD or (VERY occasional) DVD box set, that's about it. YouTube will easily fill (and exceed) whatever void of time I chose to spend there. AND I have a huge backlog of comics (and other stuff) to READ at any given time (plus stuff I'd love to RE-read again, that I first read years ago, if I can find the time), so my time is increasingly dominated by reading as opposed to viewing. I think I used to put a lot more hours into television (or DVD) viewing, but now I put in much less. But I don't go by ME, and, judging from your circumstances, you're pretty atypical of an "average viewer" yourself, so I wouldn't go by you as a yardstick, either.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on January 08, 2019, 09:21:00 AM
Even now, television seasons are too long. 22 episodes seem to be the standard now, but "Supergirl" got an extra episode last season. TV seems to be unable to adapt to changing times. Netflix, by contrast, recently cut their own seasons down from 13 episodes to 10 (see: "Alexa and Katie" season 2 versus season 1). That seems about right, especially considering the longer episode lengths that Netflix has.

You might be the odd man out on this opinion. I always assumed people wanted MORE episodes of series that they liked, not less. It may just be that you have a heavy schedule with too much TV viewing on your plate.

I can see Netflix not following the "rules" established by network television for any number of reasons, but my assumptions would be that they're producing fewer series and fewer episodes than regular broadcast networks strictly for budgetary reasons that parallel the relative sizes of the viewing audiences.

Quote from: SAGG on January 07, 2019, 11:36:32 PM
I'm not taking issue with what you're posting exactly, but in her book Harley's portrayed as WAY more benign than she is here. I think there's something else sinister going on here. Super villain mind control, perhaps? 🤔

No, it's the same principle that applies to Archie Comics, as well as other publishers. When a character becomes popular enough to become the MAIN character, and the protagonist of her own title, her character is modified in the writing to become more sympathetic to readers (i.e. "nicer"), because sales on that title hinge on the readers LIKING the character. It happened to Veronica and Cheryl when they got their own titles at Archie, and the same applies to Harley. When you reverse that and she's no longer the main character, no longer the STAR of the comic, the character upon whom sales of the comic book hinge, you can go back in the other direction.

You're thinking too deep. Inconsistent characterization in comics is no longer an indicator of any particular plot device in action. Inconsistent characterization is just par for the course because of lazy editorial standards. The thinking seems to be "We don't want to hamper or reign in our superstar writers, so as long as their name on the comic is drawing in consumers, so just let them run with it and do what they want. (We can always reboot things later.)"

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on January 01, 2019, 06:52:35 AM

Quote from: SAGG on January 01, 2019, 02:30:01 AM
...Man, that is one dark, scary, and VERY good Netflix series! 😳

I agree. I don't even like horror but I'm digging this series.  I stopped watching Riverdale this season.  Two seasons was enough for me. We'll see if Sabrina can keep up the momentum since it's been renewed for seasons 2, 3, and 4.

Wow, "Season" must mean something different than it used to mean. It used to mean somewhere around 26 weeks (which might be the number of episodes, but it could be less, down to even half that number), or about half a year, and the rest of the year the show would either repeat episodes from that same season, or go "on hiatus" for the rest of the year.

So the show's been renewed for the next three years? I never even heard of such a thing. It used to be they'd just play it by ear and watch the ratings from one year's batch of episodes (whatever number that might be) to the next year's.

Then again, this is Netflix, so it's not really "television" in the usual sense. It's more like a website with streaming content, but you have to sign up and be a member to get access to that content. So who knows what they mean by a "Season" now. Maybe they just mean Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

Quote from: rusty on January 03, 2019, 09:55:06 PMBatman/Shadow 1-6 and Shadow/Batman 1-6 - I thought the second series was better than the first.  The biggest problem that I had with the first series is that Batman goes out of his way to keep Shadow from killing Joker.  This isn't the first time that Batman has saved Joker's life.  I can see not killing Joker himself, but think of how many people Joker has killed over the years and I think Batman bears responsibility for a lot of these deaths along with Joker as a result.

My take on it is that Batman's deal is that he'll always do his level best to prevent ANYONE from killing ANYONE, with the very specific exceptions of legal state executions, or policemen discharging their weapons lawfully in the line of duty. There may have been a couple of warzone scenarios, but I can't recall specifically, so I'll leave out that possibility for the moment. Batman makes no distinctions between "attempted murder" whether the perpetrator is The Shadow or Deadshot, and whether the potential victim is The Joker or Dr. Leslie Thompkins.

I disliked the first (DC) Batman/Shadow series SO much, that I completely passed on Dynamite's Shadow/Batman when I discovered that the same writer (Steve Orlando) had been employed on the latter. That's rare for me to be that put off, because The Shadow is absolutely one of my all-time favorite characters (and I've had to put up with some pretty bad Shadow comic book stories). Relatively few comic book writers really seem to "get" what The Shadow is all about. I'd assume that's because relatively few of them have actually even read any of the original Shadow novels written by Walter Gibson ("Maxwell Grant"). Then again, the radio Shadow really isn't the same character either (even apart from having occult powers), so his character has been distorted for a good long while. Is IS possible to write a passably non-offensive amalgam of the prose and radio Shadows (but it needs to lean heavily in favor of the prose Shadow), but only a bare handful of writers have succeeded in doing so.

Quote from: SAGG on January 07, 2019, 01:52:08 AM
Yes, I like Harley Quinn as well, which is why I'm trying to understand why they're making her a killer in the Heroes in Crisis series. Harley's at the least an antihero, basically reformed. It doesn't make any sense... 🤔

Disagree. Conspiracy to murder (or mass murder) at the very least, by virtue of her past associations with Joker and Poison Ivy. She's a habitual offender with multiple counts of felonious assault -- and I don't buy that Harley (unlike Batman) knows where the fine line between general egregious bodily mayhem and "attempted murder" (or at the very least "intent to maim/cause grave bodily injury") lies. "Antihero" encompasses guys like Deadshot and Deathstroke too, both definite unremittant killers (the Suicide Squad employs a lot of killers). For that matter, I wouldn't exactly call Amanda Waller a hero, either.

You can argue that some animated versions of Harley are slightly kinder, gentler versions... but that would usually be specific to a particular episode or film.

But nobody even blinked when they decided BOOSTER GOLD was a killer. Yeah, that's totally in character.

Good examples of why I have little use for most modern DCU comics these days.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on December 30, 2018, 01:45:16 PM
Heh. It took me so long to compose my reply that you updated your post in the meantime.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 30, 2018, 02:49:10 AMAnd then you begin talking as if tie-in novels "count"... it's just ridiculous. You're comparing apples and... golf balls. It's a story, but it's just a piece of merchandising, no different than... Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Bubble Bath Soap. Those things have absolutely ZERO effect on the TV episodes in any way, shape or form, aside from being ignored (if they're even aware they exist) by 95+% of the TV series' viewing audience. The novels may be "based" on the TV series continuity, but it's a strictly one-way relationship. They are not so much PART of the Sabrina-TV continuity as "continuity-adjacent"... it's a little side-story parallel universe all its own, that can never really interact with the screenwriters' continuity. Nothing that happens in those has any effects felt in the broadcast episodes. The readers are free to "believe in" the stories, but television viewers literally missed nothing by not reading them.

Well, in that case, Riverdale (at 22 episodes per season starting with season 2) will surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch with season 5, episode 07. And it will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity only five episodes from now.

Isn't it a little bit presumptous to be talking about a show that might not even be around for a Season 5? And what if they decide to do less (or more) episodes in a season, or there's a Very Special Christmas Episode or something that's in addition to a regular episode? Or it's a special 2-hour episode or something?

I mean, you can KNOW the stats of the shows that have finished airing. They're not coming back.

Again, it's just your terminology that's meaningless to the rest of us. Why not just say... "As of the most recent episode, Riverdale has XX hours to go to tie (or beat) Series X". That's a lot easier to comprehend.

So I understood the last part about Sabrina, but then again, you're still not counting Groovie Goolies because you don't want to, even though that cartoon was joined to Sabrina at the hip from the day it was introduced. Sabrina appeared in the Goolies segments, and the Goolies appeared in both Sabrina segments, and even ARCHIE segments. Of course there were also segments (after the Goolies were introduced) where they didn't appear in Sabrina segments and vice-versa, but it's impossible to completely slice them out of the Sabrina and Archie cartoons and still have an accurate count for those shows. So how can they not be part of the same 'continuity' (which sounds really silly applied to Saturday morning cartoons, but there you have it).

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on December 29, 2018, 10:07:53 PM
As of December 26, with the publication of the tie-in prequel novel, "The Day Before", Riverdale continuity has now reached episode 09 of Sabrina's Secret Life in the animated Sabrina continuity (which includes issues of the Sabrina tie-in comic). Riverdale will surpass the animated Sabrina continuity with episode 17 of this season (in other words, nine more episodes).
Regarding the Filmation continuity, that's a bit more complicated. As far as I know, there were no tie-in comics. As for the shows themselves, I'm not counting the Groovy Ghoulies spin-off from Sabrina, because that's just original characters. Archie's TV Funnies has little actual Archie content. The gang has a few minutes' worth of story in each episode. Mostly, they're running a TV station where they play cartoons based on comic strips. Still, I'm counting each episode in full. I have no idea if I have every Filmation story segment listed in my guide (or even if they're all the same length, but I'm treating every two segments as a standard half-hour episode (with the exception of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, where three segments seem to have air in each hour)).
Based on all of that (and taking into account the Riverdale tie-in material), Riverdale looks set to surpass the Filmation continuity with episode 12 of this season (in other words, four more episodes) and become the largest non-comic continuity featuring the Riverdale gang. However, since the Filmation cartoons also had a Sabrina spin-off, it's fair to include Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in the Riverdale continuity in this particular battle. In that case, the Riverdale/ChAoS continuity is already larger.
The last thing to beat is the Melissa Joan Hart sitcom. Going solely by televised material, Riverdale has reached season 4, episode 03. By the end of this season, it will reach season 5, episode 09. By the end of next season, it will reach season 7, episode 09. To surpass Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale would have to last until season 5, episode 07. That's doable, I guess (I'm counting only Riverdale in this case, not ChAoS, since Sabrina never had a spin-off). Counting printed material, though, Sabrina is basically untouchable, considering the sheer number of tie-in novels.

Y'know, when you use terminology like "Season 5, episode 09", it's meaningless to the rest of us in real-world numbers. Different TV shows produced in different years by different companies had a different number of episodes comprising a "Season", so unless you give us the episode's aggregate number, you're not really telling us anything in terms of milestones. And even then, shouldn't a TV series with hour-long episodes be given twice the credit for each episode as a series which only had 1/2-hour episodes? I mean, theoretically, you could split any hour-long episode into two shorter "continued" chunks. So if Riverdale has hour-long episodes, it seems in terms of running time, it should approximately equal TWO half-hour episodes of a show like Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch (either the original Filmation cartoon OR the later Melissa Joan Hart live-action series). I mean, what you're counting here isn't the number of discrete "stories". If the live-action Sabrina series had a two-part continued episode comprised of two half-hour shows, you're not counting THAT as "one episode", right? And neither are you counting a Filmation half-hour Sabrina cartoon which was comprised of two (or even three) distinct story segments as more than ONE episode, am I right? So (ignoring the variation in allotted time for commercials) what you really SHOULD be counting as a yardstick gauge is half-hour programming blocks.

And no, I don't agree that spinoff series are "all part of the same show" in some larger sense. On the one hand, you can make the self-evident statement that content-wise, there's no distinction to be made between episodes of The Archie Show and Archie's TV Funhouse (and indeed, episodes of the former were aired as re-runs on episodes of the latter). But then you yourself reject Archie's TV Funnies as not fitting that logic, and we can get into sticky determinations like "Does Sabrina (the animated series) count as a spinoff of the live-action Melissa Joan Hart series?" On the one hand, one can definitely point to a causal relationship where if the latter had not existed first, then the former would not have existed either, but... it's just makes things messy, because using that line of reasoning, you can argue that the Filmation Sabrina counts as part of the Filmation Archie. Or that Angel is in fact, essentially the same show as Buffy, with a slightly different focus. I don't buy it. In terms of popularity/longevity, each show more or less stands or falls on its own by the merits of its specific content, although the distinction of exact title (which involved some variation on the word "Archie" from one season to the next) was fairly blurry during the late-1960s/early-1970s, due to conditions mostly endemic to Saturday morning animation programming content, with the Filmation cycle. If you insist on counting them all as part of the same thing, you need to include not only ALL versions of Filmation's Archie, but anything remotely connected (that includes TV Funnies, Sabrina AND the Groovie Goolies). Unless you can point to an incarnation of new episodes of the Goolies which aired as its own distinct show in which Sabrina never appeared as a character, I don't think it's fair to disinclude those.

And then you begin talking as if tie-in novels "count"... it's just ridiculous. You're comparing apples and... golf balls. It's a story, but it's just a piece of merchandising, no different than... Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch Bubble Bath Soap. Those things have absolutely ZERO effect on the TV episodes in any way, shape or form, aside from being ignored (if they're even aware they exist) by 95+% of the TV series' viewing audience. The novels may be "based" on the TV series continuity, but it's a strictly one-way relationship. They are not so much PART of the Sabrina-TV continuity as "continuity-adjacent"... it's a little side-story parallel universe all its own, that can never really interact with the screenwriters' continuity. Nothing that happens in those has any effects felt in the broadcast episodes. The readers are free to "believe in" the stories, but television viewers literally missed nothing by not reading them.

Quote from: rusty on December 29, 2018, 04:43:46 PM
I don't think we'll see the Archie gang progress into their college years, though that would be interesting to explore before the inevitable reboot or return to high school years.

Never say never. It occurs to me that they're breaking MOST of the "old rules" of classic Archie comics, so you never know. I wouldn't discount the hoopla to be gained from a "Graduation Day" story arc. Whether that would be followed by a new collegiate take on Archie and his friends, or another "new direction" in stylistic terms (meaning: reboot) is a matter of conjecture, but it seems almost 100% likely it will be ONE of those two. The average audience demographic now has to be such that exploring the college years is now a definite viability.

Quote from: rusty on December 29, 2018, 04:43:46 PM
Detective Comics 961-993, Annual 1 - I also enjoyed Tynion IV's run on Detective where we see the return of Tim Drake, his mania for control the Fall of the Batmen and so on.  James Robinson seems to have things well in hand now, but I didn't like the fill in issues between Tynion and Robinson quite as much.

Detective Comics (the Bat-family team as written by James Tynion IV) had been the highlight of the entire Rebirth phase of DC's publishing for me. That was following up on a period when (after the phase which began with the New 52 reboot, through the Convergence event, which also coincided with a physical move of DC's editorial offices from NY City to LA California, and consequent managerial reorganization) DC had cancelled virtually ALL of the post-Flashpoint titles which I had been reading, which mainly involved -- after the end of Jimmy Palmiotti's All-Star Western/Jonah Hex, Paul Levitz' Legion of Super-Heroes, Geoff Johns' and Peter Tomasi's Green Lantern titles, and Grant Morrison & Peter Tomasi's Batman Incorporated and Batman & Robin, all of which carried over continuity from the old, pre-Flashpoint DCU  --  the subset of titles falling into "The Dark" corner of the DCU (i.e. the supernatural characters, many reabsorbed into the DCU from their prior careers as Vertigo characters). The latter group was mainly composed of characters like The Phantom Stranger, The Spectre, Deadman, Zatanna, John Constantine, Swamp Thing, and Frankenstein, that for the most part hadn't been spotlighted in any ongoing DC Universe series in many years, plus a few new ones like Pandora and G.I. Zombie. As an aside, while I enjoyed revisiting about half of the 2-issue microseries published as part of Convergence itself, the overall framing storyline made exactly NO sense whatsoever. After Convergence and before Rebirth, I was left with ZERO titles to read which were considered part of the DCU proper (since I don't think things like Before Watchmen and Multiversity counted as 'mainstream DCU').

I guess the irony of the Rebirth phase for me was that the only other DCU title I can say I enjoyed was James Robinson's run on Wonder Woman (which itself followed up on some continuity from the New 52, Geoff Johns-written Justice League -- a title I followed relatively briefly during its Crime Syndicate storyline, plus a followup arc where Lex Luthor joined the Justice League as a member and developed an interesting dynamic tension with Batman (and Bruce Wayne, since Luthor had discovered his secret ID) -- regarding the status of Darkseid in the post-Flashpoint DCU (which also tied into a story arc featuring Damian in Batman & Robin). I dropped Detective Comics like a hot potato once Tynion IV left as writer (never having warmed up to anything Steve Orlando has written), and only noticed that after Orlando's story arc in Detective, James Robinson took over for an arc. I guess you just never know, because the same James Robinson (his older JSA and Starman series for DC were big favorites of mine) whom I liked as a writer for Wonder Woman did absolutely nothing for me with his story arc in Detective featuring Two-Face. I've started reading the new Peter Tomasi run of Detective (artist Doug Mahnke is an older favorite as well), but so far have been underwhelmed by both the storyline (exceptionally contrived, it seems to me, so far) and the artwork (here Mahnke's pencils -- formerly inked by people like Christian Alamy and Patrick Gleason -- are inked by a newer inker, Jaime Mendoza, whose style I don't particularly care for).

ARCHIE #701 - Well, surprise. A surprise to me, too. Here I am reading a second issue (or third, if you count that 'Readers' Digest' cut-and-pasted issue #699) in a row of ARCHIE. And it dawns on me that time has finally begun moving forward in some sort of definite progression in Archie Comics. The renumbered ARCHIE series which began its first issue in 2015 (which was the beginning of a new school year for Archie and his friends) ran 32 issues, ending with the END of the school year (the prom), so the 32 issues of that series (of which the series continuing from issue #700 is a direct sequel) covered exactly one year in Archie's high school education. Between ARCHIE (2015) #32 and ARCHIE #700, they skipped over the events of the summer vacation, and with #701 here we are back again at the beginning of the new school year again.

But unlike the classic Archie comic books, for once it isn't the SAME school year (Junior year) starting all over again. I know this due to the fact that both ARCHIE and the new BETTY & VERONICA miniseries have cover banners saying "Archie Forever" (which I presume means that they're both part of a shared continuity), and BETTY & VERONICA #1's cover proclaims "SENIOR YEAR BEGINS HERE". So they're finally Seniors, at long last! Again, presuming that this new numbering sequence which began with #700 is successful enough, in another 30 issues or so, we should be seeing Senior Year come to its conclusion (which means... graduation ceremonies).

What comes after that (in a few years of "real time" for you and me) is anyone's guess. Will they proceed on to college? Or... another reboot?? (It's been just long enough that I've disabused myself of any fond and romantically-unrealistic notions that they might ever return to "classic Archie".)

So, without getting too spoiler-y here, I guess I'll admit to enough interest to at least finish out Nick Spencer's initial story arc to see where he's going with it. I will say it does appear that something (if on a rather modest scale compared to most modern comic books) is indeed at least happening in between pages 1 and 20 of the comic (which was not a feeling I'd gotten from Mark Waid's first two issues)... not a WHOLE lot, but now that I have some sense of scale (32 issues = 9 months of school), I guess the leisurely pacing seems to fit about right. Not that I was interested enough to give Jaime Rotante's B&V miniseries a try. I flipped through a copy of #1, but the artwork wasn't compelling me to ignore my instincts. Rotante's (IMO) badly-mischaracterized interpretations of B&V in the VIXENS series was enough to put me off anything she'd write forever.