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).

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 12, 2018, 07:49:41 AM
I'll definitely be buying this digitally. Comic book stores are too much of a hassle for most people. Also I don't think Betty and Veronica's main audience is young girls. I think it's mostly men 40+, those who have nostalgia for them as sex symbols and commission Dan and Fernando to draw pin ups.

Probably true enough if the format is that of a printed floppy comic book, because those 40+ males still overwhelmingly make up the backbone of the average comic book shop's consumer demographic.

On the other hand, digest sales are so negligible through comic shops that they aren't even large enough to be included at the bottom of the lists of reported sales numbers in comic book stores. Yet someone is buying those digests (and the B&V digests' sales actually improved in recent years, as proven by the B&V FRIENDS digest's increased publication frequency since the end of the previous ongoing B&V floppy comic book). So that means there are a lot of "invisible" Betty & Veronica readers who are getting their B&V fix outside the comic book shop market. I would bet that that larger audience isn't mainly composed of 40+ males buying the digest titles in bookstores and supermarkets -- and what little merchandising of the characters over the past ten or twenty years exists, seems to bear out the existence of a largely female audience. https://www.bettyandveronica.com/

It should also go without saying that the pre-teen girl B&V readers won't be among those commissioning original artwork from Dan & Fernando. Artist commissions really can't be taken as representative of anything, apart from their having a devoted core fan following. Clearly there's a huge gap between that group and the number of readers needed to support a printed comic book's continued publication. If that weren't true, then there would be no need to Kickstarter a Die Kitty Die comic -- they could simply have published it through one of the established comic book publishers from the outset.

Quote from: gillibean on February 10, 2018, 07:59:13 PM

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on February 08, 2018, 06:32:29 PM


Let's support this thing so it doesn't get Your Pal Archied. 

OMG "You Pal Archied" I hope this one lasts!

Functionally speaking, he could just as well have said "Reggie and Me'ed" or "Cosmo'ed". Both of those were "miniseriesized" based on consumer acceptance - on whether they generated profit for the investment in the effort of creating them. So if it's "Your Pal Archied", it's because it's coming from a perspective of "...but we like Dan Parent more..."

FORMAT is important when marketing a comic to consumers, because the format itself helps dictate the size and demographics of the consumer base for that comic. The format dictates where a comic will be most likely to be sold, and which retailers are doing the ordering, and also how long the comic will remain on display and how it will be displayed -- all crucial gateways in the pipeline for a comic book to make its way into the hands of a potential consumer. Standing stock in the floppy comic format in a comic shop has to turn over rapidly, or usually not at all. Because profit margins for most comic shop owners are so thin, they often hang on in this business by doing a lot of day-to-day hand-selling (store employees' recommendations to customers) of comics that they personally like. Then there is the question of whether the largest potential target audience for the content of any particular floppy comic book could get to a comic shop, would be likely to make the effort, or would even know that particular comic book existed. These are all aspects that most digital readers aren't likely to consider, because they don't affect them. But they're absolutely vital to the economics of the publishers' bottom line.

I really have no way of knowing for sure, but the main audience for a new Betty and Veronica comic book may still be the younger audience of pre-teen girls. At any rate, all I can say for a fact is that since the old B&V floppy comic series ended, digest sales on the B&V FRIENDS title went up to the point where ACP decided it was worth publishing four extra issues a year -- and that they also decided that what that same audience really wants is MORE pages of classic Archie comics stories, so now the four remaining digest titles are ALL Jumbo Comics issues.

Apparently not enough of the people who buy the New Riverdale ARCHIE also bought YOUR PAL ARCHIE. The same logic doesn't necessarily apply to a B&V classic floppy comic book, if there's no other New Riverdale B&V (or B&V VIXENS) competing with it for the same audience. Then again, it may sell poorly in comic shops, but make up the balance in sales digitally or in trade collections -- AND if they want to continue to publish B&V digests, they have to be producing SOME new stories that will eventually be reprinted in those... so there are a number of different factors to weigh into the mix.

WEEK OF 02-07-18:
SAVAGE DRAGON #231
DEJAH THORIS #1
KINGSMAN: RED DIAMOND #6 (of 6)
WALT DISNEY SHOWCASE #1
Drew Friedman`s CHOSEN PEOPLE HC
POPEYE CLASSICS HC VOL 11 (reprints POPEYE #50-54)
COSMO #2 (of 5)
THE GREATEST ADVENTURE #9 (of 9)
INFINITY COUNTDOWN: ADAM WARLOCK #1 (one-shot)
X-MEN RED #1
TWISTED ROMANCE #1 (of 4)
YOUNG MONSTERS IN LOVE 80-PAGE GIANT #1 (one-shot) - A Valentine's Day Special featuring ten short stories of DC's monsters (Man-Bat, Frankenstein, Solomon Grundy, Raven, Deadman, Swamp Thing, Monsieur Mallah & The Brain, Andrew "I, Vampire" Bennett, Etrigan the Demon, and the Creature Commandos) in love. Obviously conceived as a fun experiment in creating a mashup of the monster comics and romance comics genres, I suspected that there might be a tendency on the writers' part to indulge in parodying or poking fun at the characters, but the stories here all seem to take on the challenge of the premise while keeping all these stand-alone stories in-continuity with their current regular stories -- they're mostly bittersweet little 8-page episodes. Not bad, really, although I think I'd have been happier seeing the opposite approach -- just throwing continuity to the wind in favor of a bunch of funny/happy ending-type throwaway shorts. DC Comics could use a little bit of humor (which you pretty much only get in SCOOBY-DOO TEAM UP) once in a while, and this would have been a perfect opportunity for that. The cover seems like a tongue-in-cheek riff on a typical old-school romance comic book, but that's about as lighthearted as it gets here. I guess the typical DC reader doesn't have much indulgence for that sort of thing.

SWAMP THING WINTER SPECIAL 80-PAGE GIANT #1 (one-shot)
MOTHER PANIC/BATMAN SPECIAL #1 ("MILK WARS" Part 2)
ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN #8 (of 8 )
SPACE RIDERS: GALAXY OF BRUTALITY #4 (of 4)
RASPUTIN: VOICE OF DRAGON #4 (of 5)
THREE STOOGES SHEMPTASTIC SHEMPTACULAR #1 (one-shot)
KAIJUMAX: SEASON 3 #6 (of 6)
STAR TREK: NEW VISIONS #20: ISOLATION

Y'know, I was just going through my digest collection the other day, and I noticed that (completely unannounced anywhere) B&V FRIENDS digest had gone from being published six times a year, to ten times a year -- and this happened a year and a half ago! I can't help but think that the lack of any new classic B&V title in that same year and half was an example of "absence makes the heart grow fonder", and led to increased demand on the part of readers for more classic B&V stories, leading to B&V FRIENDS' increase in publishing frequency. And the recent phenomenon where all the ongoing digest titles (except the brand-new ARCHIE AND ME) now seem to be regularly publishing all of their issues in the Jumbo Comics format seems to bear that out as well.

I don't want to nix it, or throw cold water on anyone, but you know that ACP always seems to announce any new title as "ongoing"... but very few of them have turned out to be. Mostly they last just long enough to generate a trade paperback collection (5 issues), like the previously announced COSMO "ongoing" -- now downgraded to a 5-issue miniseries. That happened before with REGGIE & ME as well, and somehow it doesn't look like MIGHTY CRUSADERS and VIXENS are going to be continuing past their initial story arcs, either. So here's hoping that BETTY AND VERONICA FRIENDS FOREVER breaks the curse. Maybe the demand for more classic stories in the digest format is an indicator of the turning tide -- let's hope so.

THE SIMON & KIRBY LIBRARY: SCIENCE FICTION HC
SKY MASTERS OF THE SPACE FORCE: THE COMPLETE DAILIES HC
THE SIMON & KIRBY LIBRARY: HORROR! HC
THE STRANGE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS HC

Re: covers that don't have anything to do with the story inside -- doesn't that apply to about 98% of all the comic books ACP has published in 75+ years of business? In the 1940s, and even well into the 1950s, that was almost standard practice for most comics publishers. Since the 1960s, and the rise of the superhero genre as the 500-pound gorilla of comic book genres, the opposite has come to be true. The teen humor comics genre doesn't really need to follow that policy, though.

Re: The commercials -- on TV you see the same commercials constantly, over and over again. Sitcomics are aiming to recreate a TV sitcom format in their comics, so commercial reruns seem to fit with that idea.

I forgot to mention this, but I simply don't know how Darin Henry can afford to offer a 64-page Binge Book printed floppy comic book for a mere $3.99... it seems crazy on the face of it, from an economics point of view, when other comic book publishers of floppy comics are offering 20 pages of story content for the same price.

A wonderful kind of crazy, mind you, in which the consumer is the big winner -- the 64-page Binge Book for $3.99 is like getting 3 floppy comics for the price of 1. This is no cheaply printed book with sloppy coloring on tissue-thin newsprint, either, but the same quality paper and coloring you get with the mainstream publishers like Marvel and DC. That's pretty amazing!

I haven't as yet read the new issues of SUPER SUCKERS, but I'd just like to make an observation here, relative to comparing what ACP is publishing in the floppy comics format, and books like SUPER SUCKERS, DIE KITTY DIE!, and the various PixieTrix Comics of Gisele Lagace.

To me those other companies' evolution of an Archie-style teen humor comic seems like a total no-brainer... that is, they combine the visual appeal and comedic approach of the classic Archie Comics while jettisoning the "all-ages" approach in favor of a "PG-rated" comic book (because that's the consumer audience demographic that exists in the floppy comics marketplace... and indeed it makes no difference whether we are talking about print comics or digital comics).

So why isn't ACP doing comic books like this in the floppy (and digital) format? I had to think hard about that, but the answer appears to me to have a lot to do with Archie Comics' traditional "branding" of its most recognized characters as being ALL-ages, and the ongoing viability of the digest reprint titles for that same audience. ACP doesn't seem willing to put Archie & the gang out there as "PG-rated" characters drawn in the traditional classic style in a floppy comic book due to "brand confusion" that might lead younger readers (and their watchful parents) into confusing a PG-rated Archie comic (even a comic book featuring lesser-known or new characters) with a traditional all-ages Archie comic -- unless it's a glaringly obvious genre variation on the characters like the Archie Horror books. Non-horror titles then need to be identifiable immediately as "non-classic Archie" (for some reason... even though the New Riverdale floppy titles are, at best, written at the "TEEN" or "TEEN+" rating level). And that is done at a glance by differentiating the art style, and dispensing with any situation comedy approach. The closest that ACP has come to doing a title in the classic style aimed at a slightly older reader demographic than the traditional audience is LIFE WITH KEVIN -- and that was also differentiated at first glace, less by J. Bone's somewhat different inking style than by the monochrome coloring pallette, which immediately gives pause to a consumer, by signalling "wait a minute, there's something different about this Archie comic". Yet the loss of the appealing cartoon-style artwork and sitcom-type comedy tropes in the New Riverdale comics robs the Archie characters of the greatest strength of their original appeal. It's not the names of the characters that compel me to purchase a comic about those characters, nor even the basic (although modified in New Riverdale comics) orientation of the characters' relationships to each other.

Thankfully, other people like Sitcomics, AstroComix, and Pixie Trix Comics recognize where the basic appeal of this type of teen humor comic lies, and aren't bound up in some kind of marketing dilemma over how to splinter the characters into various different versions adapted and aimed at completely different demographics.

Quote from: irishmoxie on February 01, 2018, 09:41:33 PM

Quote from: Sitcomics on February 01, 2018, 07:08:19 PM
Brand new issues 3 & 4 of Super 'Suckers just went on sale yesterday (also up in chapter versions on comixology and Amazon's kindle store).  The issue 3 letters page features an appearance by someone familiar to this forum. Has anyone read all 120 new pages yet?

I've read 3.1 so far. Saw DeCarlo Rules letter in the back.

Wow, I did NOT know that!  I've just been sweating it out waiting for the print Binge Book to become available. Off I go now to order same... 

Quote from: SAGG on January 31, 2018, 11:51:52 PM
Interesting that you're reading the Archies. I thought you had misgivings about the New Archie universe, DR. What's your take? 😊

I just picked up THE ARCHIES #4 for the variant cover by Mike Allred. I'll sometimes pick up a book for the variant cover if it's a piece of art I really like, by one of a handful of my favorite artists (Allred, Steve Rude, Alex Ross, Dan Parent, Gisele, a few others). It's hard to stick to any absolute rules about this, but I try to limit my purchasing of variants, because there are just so MANY of them. In general, I try to avoid the "limited" type variant covers (1-in-10/25/50/100) that cost 10 bucks or more, but succumb to the temptation if it's a regular-priced book.

The guest-stars in this issue being the Monkees was a factor, too -- so I figured I might as well read it (I was wondering how they'd do that, given the timewarp factor). Interesting that the regular artist Joe Eisma here adopted a pseudo-classic style for the main "dream sequence" part of the story. He doesn't quite have the cartooning chops to pull it off (as opposed to Derek Charm, when he drew the in-game "cartoon" versions of Jughead & the gang in JUGHEAD). It might have worked if they'd let Rich Koslowski ink those pages. Still, I think it would have been a much better story if they'd just gotten Gisele or Dan Parent to draw those pages. I got the impression that Alex Segura's story was aiming to reflect the same 'off-the-wall' style of story that Frank Doyle used (possibly inspired by the Monkees TV series) when doing those earliest Archies stories with Bob White in LIFE WITH ARCHIE. There is a neat little in-joke reference to the supposed fact that the Monkees passed on recording the song "Sugar, Sugar" when it was offered to them by producer Don Kirshner (in the story, it's claimed to be a rumor -- don't know if that's the actual case). Doesn't make me want to follow the title regularly... but once again, I'll be picking up THE ARCHIES #6 specifically to get Dan Parent's variant cover with Blondie. It just occurs to me that this current series of THE ARCHIES is spinning off the sales success of Alex Segura's previous collaborations with Dan Parent on ARCHIE MEETS KISS and with Gisele on ARCHIE MEETS RAMONES (but the artwork makes a big difference to me).

As for JUGHEAD: THE HUNGER, I'd say that #3 (a loaner copy) is the last issue I'll read. I've satisfied whatever curiosity I had about that series, so no need for me to continue.

01-31-18:
JUGHEAD: THE HUNGER #3
THE ARCHIES #4
RICK & MORTY #34
STRETCH ARMSTRONG AND THE FLEX FIGHTERS #1 (of 3)
GALAKTIKON #4
PUNISHER: PLATOON #5 (of 6)
MOON KNIGHT #191
PHOENIX RESURRECTION #5 (of 5)
DETECTIVE COMICS ANNUAL #1
MYSTIK U #2 (of 3)
JLA DOOM PATROL SPECIAL #1
ASTRO CITY #50

Quote from: SAGG on January 30, 2018, 11:13:58 AM
Doomsday Clock is an interesting series. What do you think of the fusion of the classic "Watchmen" and the DC characters, DR? They're certainly allowing profanity in it like the original...

I've been enjoying it so far (as I did parts of Before Watchmen). But where's it's all going, and will it ultimately mean anything when it gets there? That's usually the biggest question involved in any major comics event or story arc today. They seem to have gotten the "keep the reader hooked" part down to a science... what isn't so well practiced in comics today is the denouement -- the climax or payoff of the story. The last thing I read that was written by Geoff Johns was a long multipart Justice League story that brought back (for the first time since the 2011 DC reboot) the Crime Syndicate (the evil JLA counterparts from Earth-3), which was a great story right up until the end -- which was a big letdown. It just doesn't seem like there can be any permanent fusion of the Watchmen and DC universes, or any lasting impact on the classic DC heroes. But they've got me for 12 issues, anyway.

01-25 to 01-30:
MARVEL 2-IN-ONE #2
THANOS #15
PHOENIX RESURRECTION #3 & 4 (of 5)
DOOMSDAY CLOCK #3 (of 12)
ACTION COMICS #996
DETECTIVE COMICS #973
WONDER WOMAN #39
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #22 & 23
THE DEMON: HELL IS EARTH #3 (of 6)
CALIFORNIA GIRLS #1 (June 1987)
SOUTHERN BASTARDS #19
BETTY PAGE #7
BETTY & VERONICA JUMBO COMICS #260
DOCTOR STRANGE #281-284