Quote from: PTF on April 10, 2016, 04:09:03 PM
How can I forget? Nick St. Clair the baddest of the bad.

Was he ever in any other stories beyond BBT and the one sequel story in B&V? I'd pretty much agree with this though. There may have been a few nastier one-shot characters, but Nick's the most substantial of the ones who made more than one appearance.

Quote from: The Bee on April 10, 2016, 09:51:39 AM
I am going with the nasty scheming Alexandra Cabot who always seems out for revenge

She just needs love. She NEVER gets to date anyone! She's just bitter, but it's kind of hard to blame her. Not only does she never get a date, she NEVER wins, either -- not even temporarily. She's nowhere near as bad in the comics as she is in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I know, she could be nicer to people. Actually, she doesn't seem as bad as Alex in some of the early stories.

Let's see...

Friday 04-08
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE JUMBO COMICS #6 (finished)

Saturday 04-09
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE DOUBLE DIGEST #8

Sunday 04-10
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE DOUBLE DIGEST #9 & 10
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE DOUBLE DIGEST #9 & 10
(I'm done with Funhouse for now, and moving on to another title...)
JUGHEAD AND ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #1
(Plan to read #1-3, and 6-8; missing issues 4 & 5)

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on April 10, 2016, 01:00:44 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2016, 06:17:04 AM

Raj first appeared in TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #21 in 2008 - in a story written and drawn by Fernando Ruiz. I don't know if he's responsible for creating the character himself... maybe he'll see this and comment on that.

Ahh... Raj...

[...]

That's my Raj story.

Thank you for that long and very detailed reply, Fernando. I hesitated to just say you were the "creator" of Raj (as one would mostly assume with a story written and drawn by the same artist), because I suspected some degree of editorial input there on that particular character (although I couldn't be sure how much). The story behind the story was fascinating.


TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST, once I discovered it, turned out to be one of the most interesting digest titles (IMHO) that ACP ever published, along with JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST, both of which were published concurrently for nearly 40 issues -- a fact that I attribute largely to your involvement in contributing new stories to each issue (or most issues, at any rate -- I've yet to read all of them), and to the fact that you were throwing new characters in there, like Raj and Wendy Weatherbee (I need to find all the stories beyond those two digests where she had a co-starring, as opposed to merely a supporting role in the story), and occasionally even featuring Bingo Wilkin (a personal favorite) in new stories.


JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST is the best of all the various Jughead digests I've read, not only because of the inclusion of the regular Wilkin Boy reprints, but because nearly every issue had a perfect blend of Jughead stories by Samm Schwartz (classic era), Boldman & Lindsay (late 1990s-2000s), and you (the new story in each issue, plus some other reprints of yours that seemed fairly recent). I'm currently working my way through those, and enjoying the heck out of each one.

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on April 10, 2016, 12:31:17 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2016, 04:17:58 AM

I guess if the company could survive the To Riverdale and Back Again TV-movie in 1990, they can live through another awful TV pilot. It's not as if they're tying up their own money in it.

For whatever reason, Archie is betting A LOT on this pilot. They really believe this show will improve things for the company. I don't know how those dots connect but that's what they're saying.

Yeah, I don't see where the money flows there, either. Presumably with most of the superhero TV shows and movies, it comes from the ancillary merchandise that ties into the show or film, but Riverdale would have to be a monster hit show for that kind of merchandising to really have much chance of happening. It works for Image Comics in the case of The Walking Dead, because when the TV show generates new fans, they then hear about the comic and word of mouth is strongly positive about the comic. And while the storylines of the show and the comic aren't identical, the characters are really close. From everything I'm hearing about the Riverdale pilot, it bears little resemblance to the Archie comic book that ACP is selling, so they'd have to totally rework the comic to make it more familiar for the TV fans -- and even then, if it's not a compelling comic book, it's not going to hold those potential new readers. It's pretty much pie-in-the-sky, anyway. Phemonema like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (in its initial bloom of popularity in the late 80s/early 90s), and The Walking Dead (currently) are the one-in-a-thousand flukes of the comic industry, where comic and media adaptations fed off each other.

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on April 10, 2016, 12:31:17 PMDeep, deep, deep down, my secret belief is that, as with all of their premature announcements, the pilot is intended to give the company enough of an illusion of relevancy that they can sell it. That's just my theory though.

That actually sounds like a much more plausible explanation. Not that it will likely work or anything, but that that's what they're really hoping for in the back of their pointy little heads.

Quote from: HarryLuceyFan on April 10, 2016, 10:01:34 AM
Um, Jon Goldwater? 

I'm gonna go with Nancy S. on this one.

http://thehairpin.com/2014/01/penis-penis-penis-the-legend-of-nancy-silberkleit/

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).

Quote from: invisifan on April 10, 2016, 07:48:14 AM
If they were far enough along to mention it in 2009 they must have been making some plans at least a year or two before ...

I don't know if you're trying to imply that ACP just decided to "market themselves" to India without any real indication that there was an actual audience there, but I don't buy that either. They certainly do display a tendency to overextend themselves and go out on a limb on some faint hope of a big payday in the offing. They seem like real gamblers there, who don't really take the time to think things through, along with the possible repercussions. They tend to get excited about some idea, then focus on it with a kind of tunnelvision, until they inevitably get cold feet and back out, after bragging about their plans and schemes too soon. Risky Business, indeed.

Quote from: invisifan on April 10, 2016, 02:26:25 AM
I don't think it happened, but ACP is so known for jumping the gun with character changes to help their marketing ... isn't that roughly when Raj first showed up ... ?

Raj first appeared in TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #21 in 2008 - in a story written and drawn by Fernando Ruiz. I don't know if he's responsible for creating the character himself... maybe he'll see this and comment on that.

Quote from: kassandralove on April 10, 2016, 02:27:10 AM
Archie Reboot + Riverdale series = suicide.

Someone should make a change petition and slap Archie owners across the face with it.
Let's band together and fix this before they ruin everything !

It's kind of hard to argue with the fact that they managed to fool a couple thousand comic shop retailers into ordering over 100,000 copies of ARCHIE #1, so that's got to count for something (many of those comics are probably still sitting in retailers' back rooms in unopened boxes). Still, make enough variant covers of a comic and hype it enough, and you can trick them into buying almost anything. You have to wonder if that doesn't sour a lot of retailers on the company going forward, though.

I guess if the company could survive the To Riverdale and Back Again TV-movie in 1990, they can live through another awful TV pilot. It's not as if they're tying up their own money in it.

Quote from: nuageo on April 10, 2016, 03:29:38 AM
65 years X 365 days = 23725 panel stories 

Well, technically it was really only 64.5 years, so... 23,542.

Oh, and don't forget that these counted as part of that "25000 stories to choose from". We can take that as fact, not mere speculation, because we KNOW that these were included among the reprints in The Best of Archie Comics.



Those 2 to 4 panel stories ran every single day from 1946 to 2011, for 65 years. Each one of those strips counts as +1 for Archie's total, the same way that a typical 22-page issue of Batman counts as +1 towards his total. I wouldn't doubt that they included ads in which Archie & friends appeared, as well (whether ads for Hostess Fruit Pies and Twinkies or Capri Sun Fruit Drinks, or just those in which a small head of Archie appeared, hawking back issues or subscriptions, with a dialogue balloon spouting something like "Hey pals 'n' gals! Fill out the coupon below and send me all your money! Don't forget, the more you spend, the more you save!").

Quote from: nuageo on April 10, 2016, 02:17:44 AM
Superman has super hero friends but it's not the same. 

Maybe over 20000 stories if we remove Li'l Jinx, Katy Keen, etc.

I suspect even that number is inflated, because they can count a puzzle page or a 1/2 page gag as a "story".  If the estimate of who had the most stories had been made in the mid-1990s, I might be inclined to agree that Archie and friends was a serious contender as the record-holder, but in the past 20 years, the number of new Archie stories began to evaporate like a puddle after a spring rain. Meanwhile, the franchises like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, Avengers continue to proliferate like mold.

Quote from: nuageo on April 10, 2016, 01:47:32 AM

It is over 25000 stories with Archie and his friends.
I do not think Superman has over 25000 stories or Donald Duck has over 25000 stories. 

Admittedly, it's easy to do, and the company actually is encouraging you to identify the company with the character (thus... the name - duh). But statistics can lead you astray. That's 25000 stories that the company owns, and thus are fair game from which to choose "The Best of Archie Comics" (and naturally, many of those stories 25000 stories that do NOT feature Archie & Friends are going to be automatically discounted as "not the best").

It's not 25000 stories featuring Archie and his friends. Perhaps the greater percentage of those stories do, but not all of them. And you'd be dead wrong about Superman (and Batman) "and friends" not having as many stories as Archie, if they were all tallied. Donald Duck, I'm not sure... are we counting those featuring Mickey, Goofy, Minnie, Daisy, Chip & Dale, Uncle Scrooge, Huey Dewey & Louie, Gyro Gearloose, etc.? Then I'd say yes, easily more than Archie & Friends.

Quote from: invisifan on April 10, 2016, 01:14:38 AM
It's certainly true that we aren't representative of the general readership (or population either I'm sure) ... perhaps of the adult Archie readership (although that's a tiny fraction) ... of our population I'd say the male/female ratio appears fairly evenly divided; on a national level — Archie hasn't ever tried to market much beyond North America, or even to Latin America really — the split between US and Canada is about 10-to-1 I think (ie. about what you'd expect given populations); the only off balance stat seems to be age:  I think the average female age is maybe early 30s (some older, some younger) while the men are, it appears, closer to the other end of 40 ... I'm guessing that possibly due to cultural or biological biases the women like the romance/relationship aspects more, or sooner, than the guys ...?

In a few news stories from 2009, they made mention of the fact that ACP was about to open its first branch office in New Delhi, India (don't know if it actually happened, or if it's still open; I suspect not), which attests to the popularity of Archie in India. It's kind of ironic that for all of Archie's popularity in Canada historically (looking over ACP's past history, there are many covers and stories with a Canadian theme, and even the one-shot Archie All Canadian Digest), there isn't a single Canadian native character who appears semi-regularly in Archie stories, while there are two semi-regular Indian characters, Raj Patel (not counting his family) and Amisha Mehta... and not even counting Banni, the Indian student who took Veronica's place at Riverdale as part of an exchange program in the 6-part story arc, "Farewell, Betty and Veronica".

I don't know if I'd buy the premise that the members of this board represent even a fair cross-section of the adult Archie readers. People need to be far more motivated than the average reader (even the average adult collector) to be here.