TANIA DEL RIO just had a new hardcover book (aimed at readers aged 8-12) published by Quirk Books: Warren the 13th and the All-Seeing Eye. I believe her last prior book was Betty: Diary of a Girl Next Door, published by ACP. As with the Betty book by ACP, the new one from Quirk Books is a novel told in text, although (also like the Betty book) it's heavily illustrated; this time, by artist Will Staehle (who does not, as far as I'm aware, have any prior credits working for ACP). Quirk decided to heavily promote the book by providing a softcover chapbook composed of the first 3 chapters of the novel to comic shop retailers free of charge through Diamond Comics Distribution (which is where I learned of it). Your LCS may have copies of the free 48-page (surprisingly substantial) promotional chapbook, which was delivered to shops last week, still available.

QuoteMeet Warren the 13th. He's the lone bellhop, valet, groundskeeper, and errand boy of his family's ancient hotel. It's a strange, shadowy mansion full of crooked corridors and mysterious riddles—and it just might be home to a magical treasure known as the All-Seeing Eye. But if Warren is going to find the hidden treasure, he'll need to solve several other mysteries first: What is the strange creature lurking in the hotel boiler room? Who is the ghostly girl creeping around the garden's hedge maze? And why is the hotel's only guest covered in bandages? Full of puzzles, secret codes, outrageous inventions, and hundreds of intricate illustrations, Warren the 13th and the All-Seeing Eye will delight and confound readers of all ages.

http://www.quirkbooks.com/book/warren-13th

This is probably news to some, OLD news to others, and maybe the kind of thing that even less people might care about. It's a bit of a fuzzy gray area as far as being on-topic for this thread, but let's just categorize it as a related topic by way of "Archie creators who did work for other publishers". If you happen to be more than a casual fan of Stan Goldberg, George Gladir, and The Three Stooges, it's certainly something you'd want to be made aware of, at minimum as an interesting footnote in their careers, and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

PAPERCUTZ (which specializes in marketing graphic novels to kids) produced a couple of THREE STOOGES graphic novels back in 2012, with art by Stan Goldberg, written by George Gladir (in collaboration with Stefan Petrucha and Jim Salicrup). In this particular instance, neither George nor Stan is an "ex-Archie artist" through any fault of ACP's. Originally 4 such graphic novels were planned, of which apparently only two were actually published. You can check out previews of the published Volumes 1 & 2 over at Papercutz' official website. >http://papercutz.com/kids-comics-graphic-novels/the-three-stooges



They also have a couple of reprint collections of "The Best of" the original Three Stooges comics published in the 1950s by Norman Maurer, a cartoonist who was the son-in-law of Moe Howard of the Stooges, in collaboration with his studio partner Joe Kubert. The two artists were also notable for developing the anaglyphic (red and green glasses) stereovision process which kicked off a brief boom in 3D comic books in the early 1950s.

I present the covers of the unpublished Volumes 3 and 4 below.

Fernando Ruiz already came up with a pitch for this story, but when he submitted it to ACP he never heard anything back from them on the idea. That seems to be a common refrain among artists and writers who submit story pitches, or art samples.

If I were going to buy a physical copy of this for the cover, it would be the blank sketch variant (but not if it has that horrible block text logo shown on the "not-final-I-hope" image). At least you know having one or more of those around might come in handy if your ever had any inclination to commission a drawing from a pro artist (or even a talented amateur).

Otherwise, this is where going digital has it all over print comics. Who needs 25 variant covers over the exact same interior story filling up boxes in their house, when you can just save any of the images off the internet for free to look at whenever you want? I don't need to purchase the same story multiple times for $4 a pop when there are plenty of other comics to spend my money on.

I guess if you want to look at it that way, it's nice to have 25 flavors of cover to choose just one from, but I don't know if the idea of cultivating comic collectors instead of comic readers is a particularly good one. It sort of changes the basic nature of the hobby to make it more like stamp collecting. The cover art is nice to look at, but what does that have to do with reading comics? I can't argue against the fact that it does help inflate sales for any given issue, since if it didn't work the practice wouldn't continue, but it does feel a little creepy, sort of as if the comic book industry is only surviving on life-support. On one extreme they're pushing cover variants, and on the other extreme they're pushing digital, but the traditional middle ground of one single copy of a printed comic for one reader seems to have just fallen by the wayside. More and more the industry depends on a single comic book collector to carry the burden of being a heavy consumer by purchasing multiple titles and multiple variants of the same issue. And yeah, as it happens, I AM that heavy consumer... I just choose to allocate my money among as many different titles and publishers as possible. But... fewer individual readers, each of whom is depended on to purchase more than was the case in the past, can't be a good publishing model, can it? Whenever a single heavy consumer suffers burnout, it's like losing ten or twenty readers that the industry had in the past. Just my two cents.

Quote from: daren on April 21, 2016, 11:16:23 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 18, 2016, 12:46:48 AM

Quote from: daren on April 17, 2016, 07:21:55 PM
Yeah but Veronica is causing the conflict, it's indirect if it's supposed to be about Archie. Wouldn't it be better to say Mrs. Cooper instead of Mr. Cooper too?

Veronica can be demanding and even rude at times, but even she wouldn't talk to to the adult Mrs. Cooper that way on the telephone. I can't imagine why you'd think she would.

Because this whole story was posted on the old forum. Yes it is Veronica on the other end of the phone. This is from the the period when some writers wrote her being one step removed from the wicked witch of the west so that shouldn't be a surprise.

Do you know where I can find the whole story (or give me a title or something)? That is outrageous behavior even for Veronica. Maybe not in the real world where teenagers really do shout at their parents (nevermind other people's parents), but this is Riverdale, where teenagers actually respect some boundary lines. The weird thing is that judging from the way Alice Cooper is drawn here, it doesn't look like the story even fits into the time period where Veronica's behavior was completely out of control and over-the-top (the 1970s, mainly). Alice looks like she's from the late 80s or even the 90s, when the moms were gradually allowed to look less like grandmothers (they all slimmed down and lost weight and just generally looked younger, with only Mrs. Lodge retaining the silver-haired look).

On the other hand, I can recall several stories where Hal Cooper gets upset about the idea that Archie (whose reputation as a Casanova is obviously known to Mr. Cooper, who was a teenage boy once himself) might be alone and unsupervised with Betty, whom he's also well aware goes all weak in the knees whenever she even thinks about Archie.

Quote from: GingerGal on April 22, 2016, 06:18:32 PM
So how do you go by to add media/photos to this?

Scroll over Media in the menu bar and choose "Add Album" from the dropdown list. You can name the album by your user name, or create special folders for particular subjects. Once you've created the album, you can get to it from the menu bar by choosing "My Media", then "My Albums", from the dropdown menu. When you're on the page with your albums listed, simply click on the name of the album to open up the list of items in it. Then over on the right you'll see a column for Actions where you can Add Item(s). You can even add a whole list of files to upload to your album, and it will upload all of the items one at a time. As mentioned above by Oldiesmann, the upload limit is 1000x1000 pixels per image, or 5mb.

She's rich. She beautiful. She can be mean and vindictive. She feels she's entitled. She thinks she deserves to have it all.

Now for all of the above, I could be talking about Cheryl Blossom or Veronica Lodge. What do they have that Alexandra Cabot doesn't? Well, they know that boys find them desirable and want to be with them, and not just for their money - but not Alexandra. She's lonely. What does she think about when she's alone with her thoughts? Does she spend the entire time scheming and planning ways of revenge? Not exactly.That's what everyone thinks, because they just remember the animated cartoon, where that's practically ALL she ever did. Take the following example. It might as well have been recycled from an old script from the 1950s, with Alexandra playing the part of Betty and Alan M. playing the part of Archie. Yeah, at times it seems like Alexandra might be a fusion of the scheming, frustrated Betty of the 1950s, combined with the spiteful, egotistical Veronica of the 1970s. After this page, she probably went home to write her private fantasies in "Alexandra's Diary".


When she tries to be part of the group, and get along with people, does anyone remember that? Not really.

When Josie gets possessed by an evil spirit, who saves the day? Was it Alex? Alan M? No wait, it had to be Valerie, right? Nope, it's Alexandra who takes charge and does what needs to get done.



Yes, she even has feelings like other people do.

You'd think maybe once or twice, somebody might actually really like her (not for her money) or give her a break and go out with her on a date.
BUT IT NEVER HAPPENS. The worst part is, that deep down Alexandra realizes this and that she's doomed to be the villain because it's the part that's been written for her in life. She'll never really be allowed to win, not even a little. Futility piled upon frustration. She's stuck right where she was in the earliest issues, fated to lose and have people cheer about it. Other people's happy endings are Alexandra's misery. It's a never-ending cycle, because unless something positive were to happen for Alexandra, she's forced to seek attention in all the BAD ways. The only thing she can really do about it is refuse to be ignored. They say that money can't buy happiness, but it never stopped Veronica or Cheryl from getting what they wanted. Sometimes they lose, but sometimes they win too. Only poor Alexandra has to go through life unwanted and unloved.

Quote from: GingerGal on April 22, 2016, 12:17:31 PM
From the pictures of her in the article she doesn't seemed too upset about failing at life. As a matter of fact she looks pretty happy at her current life.

I don't even think professional psychologists and psychiatrists could definitely rule out clinical depression based on a few photographs where the person appears happy. I think that's what they mean when you hear the expression "appearances can be deceiving". They would probably pay more attention to what the person had to say about herself and how she answered a series of questions. Since most people don't have paparazzi following them around, it would be pretty easy to avoid having your picture taken when you were feeling down and depressed. Easier still to avoid putting the odd picture taken of you when you weren't feeling good about yourself on the internet. You just never know, some people can be really good at faking it and keeping up appearances even while they're struggling with themselves on the inside. Hopefully you'll never know about that.

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on April 22, 2016, 12:50:40 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 22, 2016, 12:22:05 AM

Quote from: daren on April 22, 2016, 12:11:29 AM
I'm seriously having trouble with that, it was very self explaining on the old board but on this one Im mystified.

In the "Post reply" dialogue box, you click on the image icon (far left second row, right below the bold icon) and paste the URL for the image location there. If you're adding an image from one of you media folders (what used to be called galleries), then you'll need to go to the folder where that image is located first, find the image and click on it to display it, and then right-click on the image (DON'T click on "click to zoom in") and choose "copy link location", before pasting that URL into the box that pops up when you click on the image icon in the "Post reply" dialogue box.

I need to try that. I tried copying a pic from an album to paste it on a post the other day but it looked really small, so I just ended uploading it to tinypic instead. I miss the old gallery system. It was easier because it had the img code. This new one doesn't have it.

If it looked small, it's probably because you clicked on "Copy image location", NOT "Copy link location". If the image as you were looking at it on the page where you copied the location from wasn't at its maximum display resolution, then you're copying the image location of the smaller version of that image, whereas "Copy link location" always connects back to the location of the full-sized image.

You can easily test what you copied to make sure it's the correct full sized image by opening up a new browser tab and pasting what you copied in the address bar. If it displays the image at the correct size in its own tab, then it will display the correct image when you paste that same address into the popup for "insert image" in the Reply box.

Yeah, it's a bit of a pain, but what can you do. BTW, I just checked and the old HTML code for IMG [using brackets] still works too.

Quote from: The Bee on April 10, 2016, 09:53:31 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2016, 09:51:07 AM

Quote from: The Bee on April 10, 2016, 09:42:47 AM
Yeah you are correct, but I am going by that Archie comics has been around for 76 years now.

It's actually about 74.5 years at the moment. Archie's been around since the Fall of 1941 (dated December, but probably out in October of that year), so he'll be 75 years young this coming Fall (2016).

I guess I am going from the inception of the company and according to the wikipedia page they started in November 1939.

I'm just going by what the company goes by in terms of anniversaries. They've had a number of special logos displayed on their covers over the years celebrating a 45th, 50th, 60th, and (very briefly) 70th anniversaries, and they always seem to use 1941 (the year that Archie first appeared in PEP #22) as their anniversary. So I guess those couple of years of pre-Archie comic book publishing aren't considered relevant. They are fudging just a little this year by having their 75th anniversary in the year leading up to the actual month of the 75th Anniversary of Archie. Or I guess if they were going by the year 1939, then they were already a year overdue when they started their 75th anniversary last October with the appearance of the book The Best of Archie Comics: 75 Years, 75 Stories -- but you'll see the "75 Years" logo now on the current digests. I don't think they officially changed their name from MLJ Magazines to Archie Comic Publications, Inc. until sometime in 1945 or 1946, so there's another possible anniversary, although I doubt they'll use that.

There is certainly no shortage of artists on DeviantArt.com wanting to take a crack at JATP. Radical reinventions like the one above really aren't needed, just a small tweaking, like this one by Bill McKay.

This morning:



These CRIMINAL specials are a great standalone story (last year's pictured below). There are pages from a 1970s B&W retro comic interspersed and paralleling events of the main story. Brubaker and Phillips are to comics what Quentin Tarantino is to films.

Quote from: BlueBomber2015 on April 18, 2016, 05:33:47 AM
No wonder these days, the girls are toned down.

No, I meant it's all in the context of the delivery. In a CARTOON, it's funny when someone gets bonked on the head with a hammer (or a film with cartoonish sensibilities, like The Three Stooges). If everything else in the story is being treated in a more realistic fashion, as is common in modern comic books, then it's no longer funny, and you're forced to view things more like if they were occurring in the real world, where hitting someone on the head with a hammer gets them sent to the emergency room (if it doesn't kill them outright). That shift in tone is why I largely don't think a rebooted Archie works. If the characters are being drawn more realistically, and the dialogue, situations and relationships are all being treated more seriously, then sticking in a scene where Archie gets flattened like a pancake by a steamroller no longer works. Come to think of it, that's trying to overcompensate, since even classic style Archie rarely went in for that level of cartoon body morphing.

Quote from: daren on April 22, 2016, 12:29:32 AM
Well no wonder, I don't have right clicking. Thanks anyway, I'm gonna have to figure something else out.

Well, if there's any way you can open the image from your folder in its own tab, then you can copy the link from that tab.

Other comic books, newspaper comic strips, some manga & anime (I'm picky), kaiju & tokusatsu, science fiction, cyberpunk & steampunk, 19th century scientific romances, pulp magazines, old paperbacks, music, old movies, cult movies, old tv shows, old time radio shows, cliffhanger serials, animated cartoons, toys, action figures, trading cards, cereal boxes, lunch boxes, tin toys, robots, monsters, dinosaurs/prehistoric animals, art and fiction in general. Astronomy, cosmology, philosophy, mythology, anthropology, palentology, psychology, history, quantum physics.