Quote from: BettyReggie on April 12, 2016, 09:11:32 PM
Why is Shrill involved in the comic, I didn't think she even knew Kevin. What Kevin's friends Wendy & William. And what about his relationship with boy he dated in school. Was it Devon?

Kevin and Devon broke up. That's not Shrill.

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 07:20:17 PM
Regardless if there is no reason why it has to be that way they still have to proportion stuff out equally in digital or in print. I hope I am totally understanding your post fully, but imaging this scenario. If you had a print publication that hit the stores every month and let's say it was Lil Jinx stories every month with no variation don't you think people who don't particularly enjoy reading Lil Jinx stories all the time would get fed up?

You're ignoring what it costs to print and distribute these comics, in the vague hope that they will be on sale in a place that a customer who wants L'il Jinx is likely to show up with money to buy.

The way digital works is completely different. You're buying "factory direct" from the manufacturer. There are no trees to kill, paper and ink to buy, printing press time to contract for, no copies marked as "unsold" for credit. No waste whatsoever. Buying a copy of something digital is as easy as taking a picture with your camera phone and has the same amount of overhead cost involved.

The people who hate L'il Jinx (or Little Archie) can spend their time and money on some other product. If all you want is stories that feature ARCHIE, and nothing but, then there is plenty of that for those people. Why shouldn't they cater to the audiences that just want to read Little Archie, or L'il Jinx, or Josie, or Sabrina, or That Wilkin Boy, or Archie's Madhouse? It doesn't cost them anything to sort the stories out and make them available by any particular character. Add up all those little groups of people and the combined profit begins to look substantial. You know what DOES make the customer fed up? Having to buy something that is composed of 90% of what they don't particularly care about, to get the 10% they really DO care about. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely true that many people LIKE having the variety, and when you don't know a thing about the company's characters, it's a great way to get exposed to new things. The problem here is that once you get the lay of the land, and decide there's something you really like better than a lot of the other stuff, you're stuck. Right now, you have little chance of being able to get more of what you want, unless it just happens to be Archie, Betty & Veronica, or Jughead. They need to start thinking outside the box for digital comics, because the old rules that constrained marketing to consumers in print don't apply here.

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 06:50:26 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 12, 2016, 06:37:53 PM
My basic complaint about Archie Digital is that they are a store that just sells dozens and dozens of varieties of Trail Mix. And they won't give you the list of ingredients in that Trail Mix before you buy it. I can't buy just a bag of cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds or M&Ms, I have to buy the entire bag of whatever they decided to throw in there. Most of the stuff I REALLY want is just a minor ingredient in the bag of Trail Mix, and there's no way I can increase that percentage except to buy in bulk. I gotta agree to take 10 Little Archie stories just to get a few Sabrina, Josie, and That Wilkin Boy stories. There's this attitude on the part of the company that everything they're offering is of equal value, but it isn't.

Other comic book companies let you pick out just the stuff you like, and get just that in a big collection.

You have to remember they are putting this stuff out for a lot of people and those people don't particularly like the same thing you do. They have to represent everyone when putting out in bulk. So there has to be those Little Archie stories because there are also a lot of people who enjoy them a lot as well(I am not one  BTW). So each individual is looking as you say for there own ingredients in the trail mix and it is different for everyone. That is why they have to put stuff out in bulk and I  guess they try and proportion it equally.

What you're quoting is the economics of PRINT publication, not digital. There are reasons why that situation needs to be the way it is when it comes to publishing the digests. There is NO reason it has to be that way when it comes to digital. There's no overhead for paying printers and distributors. That means that niche-marketing to 10 different groups with a small audience can generate the same profit as one item with a larger audience. In other words, small profits add up when there's no overhead to subtract from them. And furthermore, you know what? They don't really KNOW the size of the digital audience for some of the stuff in their library, because they haven't TRIED making it available that way. They only know it doesn't work for a print audience, economically.

My basic complaint about Archie Digital is that they are a store that just sells dozens and dozens of varieties of Trail Mix. And they won't give you the list of ingredients in that Trail Mix before you buy it. I can't buy just a bag of cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds or M&Ms, I have to buy the entire bag of whatever they decided to throw in there. Most of the stuff I REALLY want is just a minor ingredient in the bag of Trail Mix, and there's no way I can increase that percentage except to buy in bulk. I gotta agree to take 10 Little Archie stories just to get a few Sabrina, Josie, and That Wilkin Boy stories. There's this attitude on the part of the company that everything they're offering is of equal value, but it isn't.

Other comic book companies let you pick out just the stuff you like, and get just that in a big collection.

Quote from: irishmoxie on April 12, 2016, 04:23:31 PM
I'm trying to only buy digital now. I already have an entire room dedicated to comics. I only try to buy physical copies of stuff that isn't easy available digitally. You guys must have giant houses to store all these comics. I suppose you could be constantly getting rid of physical comics as you buy new ones but in my experience you're lucky to get a 1/10 of what you paid in the first place.

Archie Digital would be totally worth it to me, if I could really get what I want, but I can't. They barely have anything from before the mid-1990s available. So yeah, to the extent that it would save me the trouble of spending the rest of my life trying to hunt down back issues of the original JOSIE, SABRINA, THAT WILKIN BOY, MADHOUSE GLADS, BETTY'S DIARY, ARCHIE GIANT SERIES and LIFE WITH ARCHIE (the original), I'd be thrilled if they were all made available digitally.

There might be some good material in some of those DE collections, but they refuse to tell you what's in them, and as we've commented on over and over, there's WAY too much duplication of the same stories from one collection to another collection.  The only thing they're offering right now that's close to what I'm really looking for is the ARCHIE 75 SERIES of Digital Exclusives.

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 04:48:44 PM

Quote from: irishmoxie on April 12, 2016, 04:34:01 PM

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 04:25:35 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 12, 2016, 04:09:31 PM

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 04:03:47 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 12, 2016, 03:47:12 PM

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 03:40:03 PM
They said from the get go that the Kevin Keller reboot was destine for digital and that is the case. I am also very glad that Dan Parent is doing this in the classic art style.

They waffled on it a couple of times. Last summer Dan told me they'd reconsidered and were going to do print as well, then they backpedalled again.

They REALLY want to force people to buy digital comics, don't they? It's that or nothing.

I don't know if that is all completely true about them wanting us to buy digital and leave the rest. I think they'd like more people to buy the hard copies of the Archie and Jughead reboot series as well. It just seems to be declining.

So essentially ACP is slowly but surely becoming a publisher of webcomics, not all that much different than PixieTrix, SitComics, or AstroComix...

I don't know if that is there ultimate plan, but with the way it looks with the reboot series most likely only lasting  few years at most where does that leave ACP other than having the Digests?

Well they only have a handful or less of artists and writers left so in that way it's like a webcomic. From a monetary stand point it makes sense. I often wonder what they do with all those leftover digests every month. I never see them in discount stores like other books. Hopefully they are recycling them.

I also always wondered what they do with the surplus digests. Do they put them in a warehouse and save them for a later date and then put them as part of there bundle of digests in what they attempt t sell on the site or do they shred them after a certain amount of time?

Well, they don't trash the ones they have in the warehouse. They sell you a random dozen for a set price on ArchieComics.com, and I bought a couple of those sets last year (using a discount code, the best way to do it) and got a copy of BETTY'S DIGEST #1 and VERONICA'S DIGEST #5 from 1995, so you can see they've been keeping them for a while.

By the way, this isn't the same as the unsold copies from supermarket chains, B&N, Walmart, Target or whatever. Usually when a retailer requests the credit for unsold copies, they just ask them to rip the covers off (so they can confirm those unsold copies won't be sold later). Shipping copies back to the publisher or distributor just involves too much expense.

Quote from: invisifan on April 12, 2016, 12:46:12 PM
True, and they may not feel they can afford to pay that many artists this time around.

You can only pull off something like 22 cover variants once in a great while, and get retailers to go for it. (That's not even counting the additional dozen or so Retailer Exclusive variants).  Most of those dealers couldn't afford to speculate like that on even one title every month, because there's 200 other books every month with variant covers out there to think about, too.

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 04:03:47 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 12, 2016, 03:47:12 PM

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 03:40:03 PM
They said from the get go that the Kevin Keller reboot was destine for digital and that is the case. I am also very glad that Dan Parent is doing this in the classic art style.

They waffled on it a couple of times. Last summer Dan told me they'd reconsidered and were going to do print as well, then they backpedalled again.

They REALLY want to force people to buy digital comics, don't they? It's that or nothing.

I don't know if that is all completely true about them wanting us to buy digital and leave the rest. I think they'd like more people to buy the hard copies of the Archie and Jughead reboot series as well. It just seems to be declining.

So essentially ACP is slowly but surely becoming a publisher of webcomics, not all that much different than PixieTrix, SitComics, or AstroComix...

Quote from: spazaru on April 12, 2016, 03:41:16 PM

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on April 12, 2016, 01:44:27 PM
I wonder why they decided to keep it in the Classic Archie style.

Dan Parent created the character.  It would take huge stones to tell him to draw it in the new Riverdale style.

Let's just say I'M convinced that Dan Parent is the main reason the company is still publishing anything but reprints for the last 5 or 10 years.

Quote from: The Bee on April 12, 2016, 03:40:03 PM
They said from the get go that the Kevin Keller reboot was destine for digital and that is the case. I am also very glad that Dan Parent is doing this in the classic art style.

They waffled on it a couple of times. Last summer Dan told me they'd reconsidered and were going to do print as well, then they backpedalled again.

They REALLY want to force people to buy digital comics, don't they? It's that or nothing.

Well, I'm glad they decided to keep Veronica around, but I was sort of hoping that Kevin's childhood friends Wendy and William would be in the supporting cast, too. I will miss the chemistry between Kevin and Jughead, though.

Sorry to hear it's digital only again; I was hoping for a print comic. I guess maybe I can still hope for a trade paperback, but that possibility is iffy even if they eventually manage to solicit one (the last two KEVIN TP collections were cancelled, too).

Dan Parent is The Man!!

Personally I don't care what they do to the characters in the show at this point. I've read enough regarding their intentions that I have zero interest in watching it.

The only possibility that is potentially upsetting to me is that if the show (somehow, although the odds seem pretty well stacked against this) were to become a real hit. Why? Because if it does, it is virtually guaranteed to affect the comics published by ACP. They are sure to see that TV success as an indication that people want to read about characters who are similar to the TV show in the comic books. The last thing I want to see is Aguirre-Sacasa's version of Archie and the gang as comic book characters (AWA is quite enough of that), because you can pretty much bet that it would then become the main version of Archie. I'm not losing TOO much sleep over that possibility right now, since as I mentioned, the odds of the TV show becoming a real hit seem pretty slim.

Quote from: BettyReggie on April 12, 2016, 06:41:55 AM
I wonder are Leroy & Marcy brother & sister?

No, they're cousins. Leroy Lodge is from Hiram's side of the family; Marcy McDermott is from Hermione's side of the family. There was a story where Marcy's mom got remarried to man named Wells, but I don't know if Marcy or her mom's last name changed (Marcy would have to be legally adopted by her stepfather).

Quote from: The Bee on April 11, 2016, 07:34:47 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 11, 2016, 07:27:05 PM

Quote from: daren on April 11, 2016, 06:47:55 PM
You didn't miss anything.

Whenever anyone asks me how is the Archie reboot, that's exactly what I tell them.

I still don't completely understand where you were trying to go with that because I really wasn't asking you anything about the reboot really. It just so happened the the character you mentioned in your original post seemed to reappear in that issue and I found it funny that Reggie could possibly be kissing his own cousin. That is all that I was meaning in my question. Nothing about the reboot at all.

They're obviously gender-swapped clones, probably created by Stanger. See earlier issues of HOWARD THE DUCK... Zdarksi loves that plot device.

Quote from: daren on April 11, 2016, 06:47:55 PM
You didn't miss anything.

Whenever anyone asks me how is the Archie reboot, that's exactly what I tell them.