Quote from: daren on May 14, 2016, 10:03:10 PM
This last issue was awesome (again!)


Jeff Shultz's parody of the Archie main five in their famous pose:

Which is what parallel counterpart of which?  I didn't see that at all.  I guess Stewart's a little bit of an Archie/Jughead mashup and Kelly's sort of a Melody/? mashup, but I didn't see any attempt to satirize the Archie main cast there in any way.

Quote from: daren on May 14, 2016, 08:57:46 PM
I hadn't read the last couple of issues of the Archie reboot but I did today and sorry but I have gone in one year from loving this reboot to almost total apathy. Part of that is resentment over classic Archie being ditched but most of it is just the aimlessness of the "plot" which doesn't work in the realistic style they're using. I mean where is this going? I'll probably wait to get the tpb, if they put out another volume, instead of buying any more individual issues, that way if it gets even more boring I can at least give it away to someone.

Novelty beginning to wear off already. Jonathan's hesitancy about Archie #8 on the Riverdale Podcast seemed a little telling to me, knowing what an enthusiastic booster of just about everything Archie he is. On the usual scale of things for him, "slight reservations" on his part almost seem ominous.

The Archie reboot reminds me of all of the various times DC Comics has tried to revamp the Captain Marvel (SHAZAM!) family and Plastic Man. They still have the same names, costumes, and superpowers but in trying to contemporize them they're missing the intangible qualities that made those things popular in their prime.

You know, even though I have absolutely no interest in watching Riverdale, I am kind of looking forward to seeing the MAD Magazine parody of it. It just seems so ripe for satirical lampooning.

Quote from: daren on May 14, 2016, 10:08:43 PM
I like the slight manga look Fernando is giving some of the girls.

I see no inking credit on the story, just "Art: Fernando Ruiz", so I have to assume he inked his own pencils. Looks good. ACP should have let him do that more.

Quote from: spazaru on May 14, 2016, 02:10:13 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on May 14, 2016, 11:47:04 AM
They've got to be careful of "variant cover backlash". You can overwork that gimmick really easily. Five is plenty. More than plenty, really. You keep flooding the market with multiple multiple variants on every issue of every title, and retailers get burned out quickly on the idea and turned off and won't order them. A lot of fans will get turned off, too, because it makes it increasingly harder to get a specific one, if they only want one.


"ONLY" five variants... wow.

I agree to a point, DeCarlo, but I think in B&V's case, at least with the early issues, Archie should strike while the iron is hot.  There are a lot of men who will buy these just because they're hot for B&V.  Sad but true.  A company like Archie Comics needs to exploit every opportunity to make money. 

I'm not saying that's my preference for how they do business.  Just being realistic.

Except that you have to look at it from a retailer's perspective, and a lot of these guys are really (really) small businessmen who don't have the deep pockets to underwrite the sales pushes of every publisher out there. These guys are making the majority of their sales from Marvel, DC, Image, and a few other companies, and Archie Comics Publications is WAY WAY down the list. There are a dozen or more publishers ahead of them in terms of the importance of getting their variant covers, because more people want those. So they HAVE to pick and choose, and play favorites. Overwhelm them with TOO many covers to choose from if you're a relatively small publisher like ACP and they may just say "The heck with it, it's too much! I've got to save my money for investing in MARVEL variants" (or whatever). Unlike here, the comic shop world doesn't revolve around the nexus of ACP.

Archie Comics can attempt to solicit any products they want, but if BETTY AND VERONICA #1 is shipping in June, and DC REBIRTH with a dozen new #1 issues with variants are ALSO shipping the same month, then if you are a retailer who is NOT Midtown Comics, Mile High Comics, or Lone Star Comics, but just a rinky-dink local guy with a single store, trying to survive in a small town or suburb (which by the way, is MOST comic shops, numerically speaking), which variants do you think the smart money is on?

They've got to be careful of "variant cover backlash". You can overwork that gimmick really easily. Five is plenty. More than plenty, really. You keep flooding the market with multiple multiple variants on every issue of every title, and retailers get burned out quickly on the idea and turned off and won't order them. A lot of fans will get turned off, too, because it makes it increasingly harder to get a specific one, if they only want one.


"ONLY" five variants... wow.

Quote from: invisifan on May 14, 2016, 10:40:59 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on May 14, 2016, 05:05:24 AM
Having just read the entire 12 page story, I couldn't find anything the least bit unclear about it, or seeming as if it was meandering somehow in getting where it was going. Maybe it was the way you read it. Of course, I did read it all in one sitting, but it reads pretty much like any 12 page Archie story. Well, if it was featuring the Eerie Cuties characters of Tiffany Winters and her brother Dusty, and ACP stories allowed for any sort of extremely mild sexual humor. Tiffany's rival Tracy and Marine (the siren) are entirely new characters (at least, I don't remember Tracy from a previous Eerie Cuties story...) If it's unclear what a siren is or what she does, you'll have to look to Wikipedia.

Tiffany's school (Artemis Academy) mostly appears in Magic Chicks, where there's a whole raft of other students — most of whom Tiff would consider rivals and wouldn't get along with any better — but Tracy doesn't stand out in that crowd and I think she may in fact be new (at least in terms of having a separate, personal identity).

This seems to be the first story in which Tiff is the main star (previously, she's had about equal roles as part of the ensemble cast of both EC and MC). I suppose you could edit some pages down from a chapter or two to make a short where Tiff was the star, and have it read as a self-contained story. There might have been an earlier short-short, but I think I've forgotten what it was. I kinda think Tiffany is actually the most likely candidate for another spinoff series of her own (assuming they could find the right people to do it). There still seems to gobs of stuff largely unexplored about her background history, family, etc. I like her earnestness and sincerity, even though she's really still kind of a wannabe and sometimes a little bit of a spaz. She's kind of like a sidekick without a mentor.

I had barely remembered Dusty, come to that... he'd played kind of a small role in Magick Chicks (we really don't get to see much of the boys' school.., forgot the name of it). Of course Tracy could be a member of Artemis Academy, but I got the impression that slayers were fairly uncommon in numbers (compared to other monster types and monster hunter types). This might be subjective too, but I sort of have the idea that most slayers would be above all that "team player" stuff  and more sort of the aloof lone wolf type. At least, Tracy is giving me that impression. It seems likely that Tracy hasn't appeared anywhere (unless she didn't make much of an impression as part of a crowd scene). Somehow the way the story made a big deal about her being Tiff's arch-rival made me think this was supposed to be a new revelation about her past. If Tracy were at Artemis, it seems like there'd have been some big scene with her and Tiff earlier in MC. I like that situation with Dusty having a crush on his sister's "arch nemesis". Obviously there's got to be a story sometime involving Tracy, Layla, and Tiffany. I also want to see a flashback story with Layla's mom and Melissa's mom (well, the one who was originally a sorceress), since if I recall correctly, it was established that they knew each other back when.

I was glad to read that Magick Chicks is starting up again soon. I think I prefer MC over EC, overall. Well.. teenage witches, so...

Now I'm trying to remember what character(s) Dan was supposed to be drawing in his short story. Was it Layla?

Quote from: irishmoxie on May 13, 2016, 06:03:32 PM
I read some of the story about 6 pages. I didn't really get it maybe because I'm not that familiar with the franchise. Maybe it'll make more sense if I go back and read all 12 pages together. I wonder if Fernando had these 12 pages planned out in advance or took it day by day. I wonder that of a lot of webcomics actually. Maybe that's why they read so disjointed--- it's like they're making it up as they go.

The "making it up as (they) go" theory is in fact the working method of some writer/artists, although that tends to apply mainly to the layout/breakdowns stage of the art pages. These are writer/artists who find the best storytelling approach for them is to pace the story by "writing" in pictures, rather than typing up script or even a synopsis. Some just do it as thumbnails to work out the pace and the panel layout.

Seems unlikely in this case, because Fernando didn't write the story, he just drew it based on David Lumsden's script. Unless David and Fernando were working together in something like what they used to call "the Lee/Kirby method" where the writer and artist have a story conference (could even be a phone call or an email exchange), then the artist goes off to do the pencilling based on notes (his own or the writer's), and when he's done he returns the story to the writer, who looks over what the artist drew and then writes the dialogue, captions, and sound FX based on the pictures he sees. That's not as common a working method as it once was, though, and I don't think it was ever the case (apart from when Stan Lee was editor/head writer at Marvel in the mid-1960s) that it was the predominant method... even though other people besides Lee and Kirby have used it.

The most common way of collaboration between a writer and an artist is simply for the artist to type out the script giving detailed instructions to the artist about what (action, visual and background details, facial expressions, captions, SFX and dialogue) goes into each individual panel on the page. The artist still usually has leeway to interpret the physical layout of the page and positioning of the figures within the panels to some extent, as long as he's incorporating the information (and leaving enough room for dialogue balloons and captions) that the writer described. I guess working in that method it's still entirely possible for the writer to parcel out the script to the artist one page at a time, so that the artist really doesn't even know what might be coming up on the next page or how the story might end. Even that doesn't mean that the writer didn't carefully break down in his mind (even before actually typing each individual page of script) exactly what was going to happen on each page of the story, so that it would move forward to the ending that he had in mind.

AFTEREDIT:

Having just read the entire 12 page story, I couldn't find anything the least bit unclear about it, or seeming as if it was meandering somehow in getting where it was going. Maybe it was the way you read it. Of course, I did read it all in one sitting, but it reads pretty much like any 12 page Archie story. Well, if it was featuring the Eerie Cuties characters of Tiffany Winters and her brother Dusty, and ACP stories allowed for any sort of extremely mild sexual humor. Tiffany's rival Tracy and Marine (the siren) are entirely new characters (at least, I don't remember Tracy from a previous Eerie Cuties story...) If it's unclear what a siren is or what she does, you'll have to look to Wikipedia.

Good story. Tracy is kinda cute and reminds me a little of a cross between Alexandra Cabot and Wendy Weatherbee (and that's a good thing). Fernando's art here is uniformly good throughout, better than good in fact (I mean, even better than his usual Archie artwork). Tiffany is probably my favorite of all the regular EC characters (discounting Chloe who has her own series now, and isn't really part of the main cast any more). She's not necessarily the brightest bulb in the pack, but she's got a good heart (which conflicts with her slayer job sometimes).

Quote from: BettyReggie on May 09, 2016, 06:22:11 PM
I talked to Adam through Twitter & I told I think they are Betty's sneakers. And he said they are hers.

Well, no points for not guessing they were Veronica's sneakers. 

I'm kinda partial to the David Mack cover. He's not an artist whose work I've really followed up to now. Just a nice simple silhouette design, that really seems to work.

Got about halfway through ARCHIE BY BOB MONTANA: THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER COMICS 1960-1963 - THE SWINGIN' SIXTIES. The title "The Swingin' Sixties" is a bit of a misnomer here, as there's nothing particularly "Swingin' " about these strips (the "Swingin' Sixties" didn't really get underway until the arrival of The Beatles in America in 1964). I like this volume a bit less than the previous one (1946-1948) because ALL the strips here are independent and unrelated gags. In the earlier volume, Montana had little running storylines, even though each strip stood on its own as a "gag-a-day" strip. That was a tough thing to pull off, but he did it beautifully in those early strips. A punchline every day, while still moving a short continuity of related strips forward -- a series of incidents all happening during a running theme.

Also read about half of JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST #27 (good new story by Bill Galvan, who was particularly well-suited as an artist for Jughead).

Reading Dynamite's DOC SAVAGE: THE SPIDER'S WEB #3-6 now.

Quote from: invisifan on May 13, 2016, 05:27:53 PM
I gather he (they?) will be regular contributors to EC & also MC (due to re-start soon) ... beyond that Fernando or gisele would have to weigh in ...

If Fernando's 12 page story is complete, I guess I will try to read it tonight/tomorrow morning, then. I'm not used to EC doing self-contained shorts, as I kind of adjusted to the long (no set page count) chapters. I just hate waiting days between pages.

Quote from: invisifan on May 13, 2016, 03:43:55 PM
Read "Protectors, Inc." while waiting for the conclusion of Jupiter's Circle on Wednesday  — good stuff; really a long graphic novel ... Jupiter's was good to — with a return to Legacy next month to anticipate ...
After those: Silk 8 (Spiderwomen #6), Gwenpool 2 (funny — of a sort I don't usually enjoy, but it's growing on me ...) and of course Archie ... which was good, but ... while I enjoyed it it was just ... good ...
Also read through Paul Jenkin's Sidekick ... just gratuitous humour  if it wasn't relatively short (and long finished) I'd have dropped it ...

Protectors, Inc. the J. Michael Straczynski book? Funny you mentioned Paul Jenkin's Sidekick, as I'd never heard of it or him (or is it the Marvel Paul Jenkins? Different guy? Jenkins is not known for his humor.), but while I didn't read JMS' Protectors, I did read J. Michael Straczynski's Sidekick (interesting, but pretty downbeat... there are no real good guys in the story, so it's hard to know who you're supposed to root for by the end of it). Intriguing concept, but I'm not so sure how I felt about the ending. I was reminded somewhat of Rick Veitch's Bratpack, from long ago.


Hermes' THE PHANTOM was great, but it did make me wish there was some way there could be a real Phantom/Tarzan crossover story. Old-school in a good way, and much better than Moonstone's Phantom (which wasn't bad, really) and MILES better than Dynamite's. Can't wait for Hermes' second Phantom series coming in August.

Quote from: PTF on May 09, 2016, 03:05:07 PM
I'm actually looking forward to Riverdale. It seems like it's going to be totally insane.

I'd have to agree that it certainly sounds "totally insane", but maybe not in the same sense that you're meaning. More like in the sense that sanity is good, and INsanity is bad...

Quote from: invisifan on May 13, 2016, 04:02:13 PM
Page 12 of 12 of Siren Brawl is up ... just noticed the BC homage  — great stuff ... anticipating more 

Is this a standalone 12 page "guest artist" story for Fernando, or is he doing a whole volume of Eerie Cuties? And wasn't there supposed to be a Dan Parent story as well, or is that what's coming up next?