Quote from: gillibean on February 19, 2018, 02:13:18 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 19, 2018, 01:07:32 AM
You're still in high school so I wouldn't expect that's the sort of customers they're aiming for. It's really for the fashionistas, otherwise they'd be selling that stuff at the Gap or Hot Topic or something. You've got to expect that, if they're marketing it through a fashion designer like Rachel Antonoff, so compare it to the consumer demographics for similar designers. It's not for your average people because we have all kinds of department and clothing stores for them.

You usually can't stand Riverdale the comic book, or just the show in general?

Yeah, didn't think I was the target audience.


I meant the show, I'll pretty much read anything Archie comics publishes. The comics aren't amazing, but i'll take it any day over the show.


I can appreciate certain aspects of Riverdale (the show) but overall its really bad.

It's interesting to hear you say that, because my assumption was that you really are in that show's target demographic. That could be a misperception on my part, and maybe the show really is skewed to an older audience in their 20s and 30s. Not that I didn't think the show was hoping to appeal to the 20s and 30s-somethings out there, but I certainly guessed that they hoped to appeal to a lot of teenagers as well. It's not the type of show that interests me, so I haven't watched it myself -- and I can certainly see where there'd be a lot of people out there who'd fall into the "just no interest" group, but the people that have been at least interested enough to give it a trial run generally seem to like it, and yours is the first opinion I've seen along the lines of "tried it, didn't care for it". I sort of appreciate your even-handedness in saying that you can appreciate "certain aspects", which tends to make me think your opinion isn't something reactionary, but a little more considered, which tends to lend it more weight to my mind.

Quote from: gillibean on February 18, 2018, 08:13:15 PM

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 13, 2018, 07:07:15 PM
I'm not sure who is buying that Betty and Veronica merch. It's way too expensive for the average digest reader. I suspect it's young women (20s) who are also fans of Riverdale and have deep pockets/Daddy's money and like to dress up as pin ups on a daily basis.

I'm a junior in high school, I get the digests every month, I usually cannot stand Riverdale, and do in fact have a job. If you are referring to the Betty and Veronica fashion line, I have bought from them before, and I do agree that some of it is expensive. I received a jacket as a Christmas present, but the other times I have paid for it MYSELF. I don't think I dress up as a "pin up" on a daily basis, but do agree that some of the clothes are a little much. I don't think I'm apart of the main crowd who buys these clothes, and when you go to their tagged section on instagram you can see that you're pretty much right on the money with your guess.


I just wanted to point out that I am different than the usual customers 

You're still in high school so I wouldn't expect that's the sort of customers they're aiming for. It's really for the fashionistas, otherwise they'd be selling that stuff at the Gap or Hot Topic or something. You've got to expect that, if they're marketing it through a fashion designer like Rachel Antonoff, so compare it to the consumer demographics for similar designers. It's not for your average people because we have all kinds of department and clothing stores for them.

You usually can't stand Riverdale the comic book, or just the show in general?

Most of the New Riverdale artists aren't bad in the sense of where you can point to some specific thing like poor anatomy or bad composition. It's just, on average, that the artists they pick tend to be kind of bland and ho-hum, middle-of-the-road, plain-vanilla. They can draw, but there are a hundred other artists who can do so just as well or better. There's just nothing specific, nothing particularly interesting or appealing about them that stands out or is notable in any way. The New Riverdale comics aren't the 'action genre' type, so I don't expect the artwork to impress me in terms of being dynamic or powerful or especially dramatic, but I guess what it needs is to be more expressive in terms of the faces and body language, or the storytelling aspect (page layout and pacing) needs to be more interesting or more nuanced somehow.

02-16-18 to 02-18-18:
SHADE THE CHANGING GIRL/WONDER WOMAN SPECIAL #1 ("MILK WARS" Part 3 of 5)
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #24
CAPTAIN AMERICA #698
MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #3
DOCTOR STRANGE #385
KILL OR BE KILLED #16 - Just an amazingly well-told, interesting story with a 'high-concept' premise that keeps you guessing all the way along. One of the absolute best comics on the market right now. It could be one of those Showtime, Netflix, or HBO series in terms of realism... but part of the idea is that we're never quite sure what is real here and what is not.

KICK-ASS #1 (of 6) - Surprisingly, this had no connection (the only tenuous connection is the protagonist's costume) with the previous KICK-ASS series that was adapted into a couple of films. Feels a little like a bait-and-switch scheme, but I guess I'll wait another issue or two until I can figure out where this one is actually headed.

SKYBOURNE #5 (of 5)
COMIC BOOK CREATOR Magazine #16 (Interview with Dan Parent!)

Quote from: SAGG on February 17, 2018, 06:57:45 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 17, 2018, 05:37:55 AM

Quote from: SAGG on February 17, 2018, 04:48:53 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 16, 2018, 11:56:37 PM

Quote from: SAGG on February 16, 2018, 11:37:42 PM
Anybody else got this? It's the one where The Gang are following Ronica around the world to ski resorts. I've seen this before in other Archie digests. Why doesn't ACP make sure they're giving us the stories in their whole form? Somebody's not editing right. I mean, we've seen words being misspelled and such, but splitting stories is outright incompetence.... 

You mean it's a story which breaks down into several chapters, but somehow or other they didn't print the chapters together one after the other,  but instead spread them out and interspersed other reprints between the chapters? Or did they only print one chapter of a multi-chapter story and forget about the rest of it altogether?

Both. They actually did both...

Could it possibly one of those rare continued stories where the next part originally appeared in the following issue (and would presumably be reprinted in the next issue of the same digest)? Or did they edit the story it in such a way that at least the story ended on one of those "punch line" gags?

Well, it just...ended. I think it was on page 9. There was no "to be continued"....

Hmm... that sure sounds like an editorial mistake, unless it's just your individual copy of that particular issue that got messed up at the printers, and is missing pages. What issue # was it? I stopped getting it with Archie Jumbo Comics Digest #285 (January), which sounds like it's the previous issue. A timely decision on my part, it would seem.

I think my basic problem with most of the new Archie Comics is that I really don't understand the mindset of the approach to the characters at all. I would make the single exception of JUGHEAD to that statement, because it seems like someone rightly acknowledged that you just CAN'T approach Jughead as a realistic character or try to interpret him seriously, because his basic defining characteristics absolutely defy that. So what you got instead was a re-interpretion using a different type of approach to humor (as opposed to the classic, slapstick/situation comedy approach).

When I look at the other new Archie Comics (not talking about the superheroes or Cosmo here), I just have... no response. No emotional reaction or connection with it in any way. To me they just seem like oddities that I don't know what to make of. I mean, they attempt to present some sort of functional continuity that can be followed in the usual way of sequential storytelling, but I constantly feel like I just walked into a party where I was told all my old friends would be there -- but looking all around me, all I see is a room full of strangers wearing these stickers that say "HELLO My Name Is ARCHIE" or "HELLO My Name Is Betty", "HELLO My Name Is Veronica", etc. and I'm just staring at them and thinking "Who the heck ARE these people, really?" It's this weird unsettling place where there are bits and parts where they seem to confirm who they claim to be, yet there are just as many strange, unfamiliar things about them making every moment I spend in this room an analytical guessing game. So there's no emotional reaction to what's going on here, it's just me watching stuff happen from the distant POV of a very detached observer.

And what pops into my head is the thought "Is this what non-comics reading people see when you show them a comic book?" Sure, they can read the text and understand it, and know that those lines on the page represent people going about, doing things and moving through space over time. But in the end, they hand it back to you with this blank expression of "Yeah, I understood it I suppose... but so what?"

The other thing that pops into my head is the impression that if I hadn't read comics in years and years, and didn't know stuff about how they're created, who the creators are, and how the industry works and so forth, but was familiar with the older icons of comic books, and you handed me a copy of ARCHIE, my first reaction would probably be something like "Marvel Comics publishes ARCHIE now??" That's what they look like upon seeing them for the first time, as if somehow Marvel (or DC) had licensed Archie -- how they'd approach it and reinterpret it from their perspective. And to be sure, a lot of Marvel and DC's iconic characters now strike me almost the same way, as far as how they're being interpreted currently, and I have the same strange feeling of detachment towards characters which once excited me. Hello, do I know you? But at least the Marvel and DC characters have evolved away from from their familiar selves over years and years of change, and not literally overnight.

In the end, the things I would be expecting and looking to get out of reading an Archie comic book are just nowhere to be found in the new ones.

Quote from: SAGG on February 17, 2018, 04:48:53 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 16, 2018, 11:56:37 PM

Quote from: SAGG on February 16, 2018, 11:37:42 PM
Anybody else got this? It's the one where The Gang are following Ronica around the world to ski resorts. I've seen this before in other Archie digests. Why doesn't ACP make sure they're giving us the stories in their whole form? Somebody's not editing right. I mean, we've seen words being misspelled and such, but splitting stories is outright incompetence.... 

You mean it's a story which breaks down into several chapters, but somehow or other they didn't print the chapters together one after the other,  but instead spread them out and interspersed other reprints between the chapters? Or did they only print one chapter of a multi-chapter story and forget about the rest of it altogether?

Both. They actually did both...

Could it possibly one of those rare continued stories where the next part originally appeared in the following issue (and would presumably be reprinted in the next issue of the same digest)? Or did they edit the story it in such a way that at least the story ended on one of those "punch line" gags?

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 17, 2018, 01:31:48 AM
Harvey and Ivy meet Betty and Veronica actually kept my attention more than the Vixens series but both are series I only read if I'm bored.

Hmm... it worked exactly the opposite for me, and by the time I had gotten to the end of H&I/B&V #1, I had completely lost interest in the idea of reading #2. Maybe that's because I DO like Harley & Ivy, and it seems like they just tossed the idea out there and handed it off to whoever was free to write and draw it, like it wasn't worth bothering to get a 'name' writer and artist. I think if that if someone like Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner had been given the assignment it could have been great, or if they'd given that series to Adam Hughes to draw and gotten a script with a sense of humor it could have worked, too. They didn't even need to involve creators who'd have put a big dent in the budget -- Chip Zdarksy (or Dan Slott) and Audrey Mok (or Guillem March) probably would have done a good job of it without breaking their bankbook. Even better if they'd gone with the animated Bruce Timm versions of Harley and Ivy and gotten someone like Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett to do it. Talk about wasted potential! It just feels like they figured they could paste the logos for H&I and B&V on the cover and sell it just on the basis of the names alone and having a few variant cover versions, and like the actual writing and artwork was more or less an afterthought. Normally I like Paul Dini as a writer, but the whole plot idea was just plain dumb.

Then, just to rub a little more salt in the wound, they had to give you just a glimpse of what the whole thing could have looked like had they chosen to travel down "the road not taken".... 



I'm still waffling on VIXENS and probably won't settle on an opinion until it's over.

I could have sworn that Kelly's last name had been mentioned before in passing somewhere in issues #1 or #2, but maybe I'm just imagining that. I'd have to get them out to check.

Quote from: SAGG on February 16, 2018, 11:37:42 PM
Anybody else got this? It's the one where The Gang are following Ronica around the world to ski resorts. I've seen this before in other Archie digests. Why doesn't ACP make sure they're giving us the stories in their whole form? Somebody's not editing right. I mean, we've seen words being misspelled and such, but splitting stories is outright incompetence.... 

You mean it's a story which breaks down into several chapters, but somehow or other they didn't print the chapters together one after the other,  but instead spread them out and interspersed other reprints between the chapters? Or did they only print one chapter of a multi-chapter story and forget about the rest of it altogether?

One thing I've noticed in some stories is that a page ends on a gag, and that functionally, that could actually be the end of the story, but instead it continues on for more pages in the same vein with additional "punch lines" along the way based on the initial idea before getting to the end. It occurred to me that the story construction could actually be purposefully designed that way so that there's an option to edit the story and reprint it with fewer pages, as long as it ends on one of the "punch line" panels. Then again, with some of the newer 5-page shorts the basic story idea almost seems like a throwaway, where it feels like the setup would have allowed it to continue the situation beyond where it ends on Page 5 with a joke -- the story seems like it has just barely gotten started, and could have continued to develop a series of gags based on the original idea that it started with. Some of the newer Dan Parent stories leave me feeling that way, like he could have continued on for another 5 or 10 pages with more developments on the same idea, because it was a good idea that was barely exploited to its potential advantage for humor before coming to a quick end.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on February 16, 2018, 02:24:16 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 16, 2018, 11:07:37 AM

Quote from: BettyReggie on February 16, 2018, 10:13:32 AM
I can't wait for this. I miss Dan Parent. I'm not crazy about the artwork in Betty & Veronica Vixens. I thought it would be better.

Yeah, I did too, based on the cover artwork by Eva Cabrera. Her cover art seems a lot better than her interior artwork -- or is it just me?

Starting with issue #3, she seems to have switched from that weird...whatever it was from the first two issues to a more anime-inspired style. The girls' clothes and hairstyles are no longer retro either. I think it's an improvement.

Given the way it's being written, I can't quite figure out how it can NOT be retro. It's sort of like some 1950s-style movie about "girls gone wild", but then they have computers, smartphones and social media. Women still have the same basic social status and are treated like they would have been in the 1950s (or maybe that's just how Jaime Rotante actually sees things). A pretty weird parallel universe that doesn't resemble our 21st century at all, except that they share some of the same technology.  I didn't actually notice any change in the art between #2 and #3, but I guess I'd have to pull them both out and compare them side-by-side.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on February 16, 2018, 12:31:14 PM
I can't say I'm surprised, although I've really enjoyed the book.  It's probably weak sales that's ending it (I haven't looked up the sales), but it also could be because after they got The Monkees and Blondie, they weren't able to get any more well known "guest" bands to appear in the book. 


I can't imagine what the future is for the RIVERDALE comic title because while I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stories, Thomas Pitilli's art is horrible in that book in my opinion.

Enough to compile into a trade paperback, which is the usual performance of any new floppy title. That goes for the ones I like as well as the ones I don't. JUGHEAD managed to get three, so for ACP it did much better than average.

Only two titles seem to have escaped that fate (so far): ARCHIE and RIVERDALE. Since Riverdale is still on TV and popular, I guess it'll last a little longer than most of the others.

I agree with you about Pitilli, but Eisma isn't much better, and there really hasn't been a new Archie artist except for Derek Charm that I thought was outstanding. Adam Hughes and Audrey Mok are both good artists, but it'll never matter to me if I don't care for the way the stories are written, because I'm never going to buy it just to flip through and look at the drawings. Apart from Derek Charm's issues of JUGHEAD, I haven't bought a single one (except for a few cover variants I really liked by Gisele, Dan Parent, and Mike Allred -- JOSIE #1, RIVERDALE #1, and The ARCHIES #4). Either I don't like the artwork, or I don't like the writing, or both. The ARCHIES might not have been too bad (judging by #4) if Charm or Mok drew it, because it's not horribly written (except for the one-shot). It just needed to be a little funnier... and the artist could have helped out with that, too.

The obvious and smart thing to do here if ACP would like to have 3 other comic books every month that sell as well as ARCHIE, is to publish ARCHIE every week instead of every month. Not another Archie spinoff title... ARCHIE. They just have to hire 3 more artists to do it, but it would seem not to matter since the artist drawing the book isn't what's selling it, and those people who like it will buy it regardless of whether that artist is Fiona Staples, Thomas Pitilli, Joe Eisma, or Audrey Mok. It should be a snap for Waid to write it, because he can easily write 4 scripts a month, particularly simple ones where there isn't a lot happening in any one particular issue, like ARCHIE. The problem is that for Waid to do that, he'd have to stop writing his other titles for other publishers. He's not going to be giving up a paycheck from Marvel for AVENGERS, which is one of Marvel's Top Two selling titles right now, for "Archie money".

Quote from: BettyReggie on February 16, 2018, 10:13:32 AM
I can't wait for this. I miss Dan Parent. I'm not crazy about the artwork in Betty & Veronica Vixens. I thought it would be better.

Yeah, I did too, based on the cover artwork by Eva Cabrera. Her cover art seems a lot better than her interior artwork -- or is it just me?

02-09-18 to 02-15-18:
KYRRA: ALIEN JUNGLE GIRL TP
Akihiro Yamada's LOST CONTINENT #1-6 (of 6)  [Eclipse Comics, 1990]
Yukito Kishiro's BATTLE ANGEL ALITA Deluxe Edition HC VOL 01
Shigeru Mizuki's KITARO VOL 05: KITARO THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
DRAGONS RIOTING VOL 08 (of 9)
SAINT SEIYA: SAINTIA SHO VOL 01
ACTION COMICS #997
TITANS #20
WONDER WOMAN #40
DEADMAN #4 (of 6)
DETECTIVE COMICS #974

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 15, 2018, 04:23:35 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 14, 2018, 03:30:40 AM

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 13, 2018, 07:07:15 PM

Ok there may also be some grandmothers buying digests from Walmart and grocery stores who like the classic stories they read in the 60s/70s. .

Some, maybe. You're reading them (even if buying them digitally)... are you a grandmother? If that's really the main demographic, then why aren't the digests primarily filled with B&V stories from the 1960s and 1970s, for the gratification of grandmothers and ?

Instead, most of the reprinted stories are from the 1990s through 2010 or so. My guess would be that the girls who read those stories when they were new are now the young women and mothers purchasing the merchandise for themselves, or the digests for their daughters (and maybe some of those 40+ male parents too).

I'm more of an occasional digest reader these days though I have read a lot in the past. I think the only reason they use the 90s and 00s stories is because they're already digitized and easy to reprint. A lot of the older 60s-80s stories which the grandmothers really want aren't digitized and would have to be re-colored. A lot more work for ACP who would rather make a cheap easy profit. I think the grandmothers buy the digests hoping for 1-2 of those older stories.

I'll allow that the content may be influenced by the amount of digitizing work necessary -- yet at the same time, in order for the company to derive the maximum value out of its library of older content, it seems inevitable that all of that work MUST be slated for digital conversion at some time in the near future, if for no other reason than to provide the greatest potential to exploit ALL possible consumers in the demographic spectrum, regardless of the format in which those reprints will eventually appear. I think (and recent trade collections lead me to believe this is already happening) that those older stories will eventually appear in more expensive reprint formats, aimed at older readers with more disposable income.

I'd strongly suspect that the selection of content for the digests is specifically slanted towards younger readers, so as to not include so many older stories where various topical aspects of the story may alienate those younger readers or puzzle them by its unfamiliar references, fads or fashions. That's also why I think it's an ongoing concern to maintain a stream of newly-produced stories which will eventually feed into future digests, because even the currently-reprinted digest stories from recent decades continue to age, and will eventually be less palatable to younger readers.

There are a couple more observations I can make in support of my contention that the main audience of digest readers is composed of children. Now, the counter-argument here would be that at $7 a copy, kids aren't going to be wandering into stores by themselves with enough loose pocket money to purchase a Jumbo Comics digest for themselves -- adults remain the holders of the purse-strings, the enablers/approvers of their kids' reading of Archie digests, probably based on their own past experience having read them as kids. But I don't think those same parents are (for the most part) reading the digests themselves. For one thing, I notice in reading the new lead stories that they are written slightly differently, aimed slightly lower than was the case in reading the stories printed in new issues of the classic floppy comics prior to 2015 when they were discontinued in favor of the New Riverdale reboots. Second, for a while the larger digests issues were, for a couple of years there, including on a semi-regular basis the older 1950s stories (for the benefit of the grandmothers and other adult readers) labeled as "From the Vault" sections, in an obvious attempt to try to appeal to older readers, but for the last few years now those sections have disappeared -- which I can only interpret as because they didn't result in selling more copies of digests to adults, and the kids really didn't care that much for them. Thirdly, the policy of editorial tampering/alteration of the original stories when reprinted in the digests remains in effect, now as ever before. Adults can easily spot these obvious alterations, whether they're done for purposes of political correctness or for reasons of updating some archaic reference to technology, etc. and if those adults were the main readers of the digests, I don't think the editors would bother. It's just extra work for the production department, and the adult readers really don't like to see it. While I think most adults are generally in support of the idea of a racially diverse Riverdale, seeing token incidental characters randomly chosen to be re-colored in older stories as representing different races and ethnicity really isn't something most adult readers want to see, regardless of their own family genealogy. And adult readers don't need references to VCR tapes or other outdated technology clumsily re-lettered in dialogue balloons and captions, either. We accept it only with the understanding that it's being done for the younger readers, to make the stories seem a little more ethnically inclusive or less distracting by archaic topical references, for their benefit. -- but otherwise find the policy abhorrent to our sensibilities of wanting to read the stories just as they originally appeared in their first appearances in various comics. And they're still wasting valuable page space in all those digests printing those "puzzle pages" -- does ANY adult actually DO those puzzles? I have to assume they're still in there only because the kids seem to like them, and that means most of the reading audience.