Quote from: Vegan Jughead on November 01, 2017, 08:58:11 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on November 01, 2017, 07:33:31 AM
Wasn't "Passion Point" also a makeout spot on HAPPY DAYS? I admit my memory of the show is a little fuzzy after a few decades, but it immediately seemed to ring a bell. I don't recall ever seeing it in an Archie story, so I guess my memory was from the show.

I think that was Inspiration Point.

You might be right about that. Googling "Inspiration Point" reveals a number of actual so-named places from Santa Barbara, CA to Yosemite National Park, including at least one "Inspiration Point Christian Camp & Retreat Center", which made me chuckle at the thought of Richie Cunningham parking there with a date.

Passion Point must have been a short-lived fling in Archie Comics for me to have missed it.

Wasn't "Passion Point" also a makeout spot on HAPPY DAYS? I admit my memory of the show is a little fuzzy after a few decades, but it immediately seemed to ring a bell. I don't recall ever seeing it in an Archie story, so I guess my memory was from the show.

They already made a middle-aged Archie movie... TO RIVERDALE AND BACK AGAIN in 1990, even though it didn't involve time travel. Why do essentially the same thing again? Adding the time-travel angle isn't enough to make middle-aged Archie all that interesting, and that would imply that the series was targeting an entirely different audience. It doesn't really matter that the actors in the 1990 movie may have aged a little better than Louis C.K., or even if they were a few years younger. If they wanted something like that, they should have just done some sort of loosely-adapted LIFE WITH ARCHIE>

Oh, and of course the seven stories that were removed from the new HC edition were ALSO prefaced by comments that have now been removed and NOT replaced, so the actual percentage of "substitution" commentaries might be less than 20%.

Quote from: irishmoxie on October 24, 2017, 06:36:36 PM
I wonder if Fernando asked to be taken out?

Hope I didn't give the impression that ONLY Fernando's comments were selectively removed. There were a number of different substitutions of new comments, and I think maybe only 2 or 3 (at most) of those quotes were from Fernando. It's just that I didn't bother making a detailed list, and his was the first I noted as being replaced, so no other specific names came to mind -- but somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-25% of the original comments have changed. Come to think of it, that might be true (seems probable, in fact) of the first HC volume as well, although I haven't checked it.

I meant to do this a month ago when I got the new deluxe hardcover edition of THE BEST OF ARCHIE COMICS: BOOK TWO, so here it finally is.

I'm going to keep this short and just list what's missing and what's been added, but I should probably also mention that there are a number of instances where the original text commentaries prefacing the stories have been replaced by newer comments by different people (for example, all of the comments on stories attributed to Fernando Ruiz have been replaced by comments by different people). The numbers in parentheses are the page numbers that the stories appear on in the original 2012 TP edition (MISSING) or the new deluxe hardcover edition (ADDED), which also includes pages on which any comments prefacing the stories appear.

MISSING stories from the original 2012 TP edition:
(146-156) LITTLE CAPTAIN PUREHEART in "Attack of the Molemen"
(234-238) JOSIE in "Hi-Style Hi Jinks"
(239-255) LITTLE ARCHIE in "Little Archie and the Secret City"
(265-269) JOSIE in "The Image"
(277-281) THE ARCHIES in "Rock 'n' Rassle"
(282-289) ARCHIE 3000 in "Wieners Over Riverdale!"
(391-392) JINX in "Fitting In" and "It's Complicated" (both 1-pagers)

ADDED stories in the new 2017 deluxe HC edition:
(361-382) REGGIE AND ME #1 (2016) no title
(383-404) YOUR PAL ARCHIE #1 (2017) "The Road Worrier" and "A Night at the Opera"
(405-416) RIVERDALE #1 (2017 one-shot) ARCHIE in "Sweetwater"

WEEK OF 10-18-17 to 10-23-17:
JIMMY'S BASTARDS #4
THE KINGSMAN: THE RED DIAMOND # 2 (of 6)
SPY SEAL #3 (of 4)
THE VISITOR: HOW & WHY HE STAYED TP
FUTURE QUEST PRESENTS: SPACE GHOST #3
SCOOBY-DOO! WHERE ARE YOU? #86
UNDERDOG #2
SAVAGE DRAGON #227
ASTRO CITY #48
SHERLOCK FRANKENSTEIN & THE LEGION OF EVIL #1 (of 4)
HELLBOY & THE B.P.R.D. 1953 HCF 2017
GREEN HORNET '66 MEETS THE SPIRIT #4 (of 5)
THE GREATEST ADVENTURE #6 (of 8 )
SHEENA #2
KISS/VAMPIRELLA #5 (of 5)
THE CHARLTON ARROW #1
2000 AD FCBD 2017
THE SIMPSONS' TREEHOUSE OF HORROR #23
THE TICK FCBD 2017
THE TICK HCF 2017
GRIMM TALES OF TERROR HCF 2017
KONG: GODS OF SKULL ISLAND #1 (one-shot)
STAR TREK: NEW VISIONS #18: WHAT PAIN IT IS TO DROWN

Quote from: irishmoxie on October 19, 2017, 03:37:27 PM
I was also disappointed in the Archie Halloween Spectacular. All recently reprinted Halloween stories I'd read before and only about 22 pages I believe. It should've been a freebie for FCBD.

Btw DeCarloRules, how did you get to read those FCBD books early?

Retailers get those Halloween ComicFest books shipped to them a couple of weeks before the week of Halloween. I have an inside connection since my LCS owner is a personal friend whom I've known for 20+ years, and I help him out on a regular basis by managing his subscribers' list and pulling all the product for them, logging re-orders, and handling special requests (which amounts to less than a day's work, added up over the course of the week, with everything except the weekly folder-filling being done online from wherever I am) in exchange for getting all my comics at store cost -- which is pretty much the only reason I can afford to consume the dangerously high volume of comic-related product that I do.

If you think about it, the only titles that have been around longer than 5 issues (1 story arc) are ARCHIE, AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE, CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, and RIVERDALE. That's only four, and all of the others are "newbies" that may or may not be around a year or two after their first issue.

Nice! I'm still waiting for #4 and 5 to ship. I've been getting both covers, but still plan on buying it as a TP collection.

Apart from the reprint digests, just about EVERY Archie Comics brand (or imprint) has only one or two ongoing titles.

Riverdale TV series:
RIVERDALE

New Riverdale:
ARCHIE
THE ARCHIES

Archie Horror: (but they only come out with a one or two issues a year... which is stretching the definition of an "ongoing title")
AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE
CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA
JUGHEAD: THE HUNGER (*hasn't even come out yet, so hard to say if it'll be "ongoing" or not)

All-New Classic Archie:
YOUR PAL ARCHIE (not really an "ongoing" anyway)

Archie Alterniverse: (there's no real imprint for this one, so I just made one up)
BETTY & VERONICA: VIXENS (*hasn't even come out yet, so hard to say if it'll be "ongoing" or not)

Dark Circle:
THE MIGHTY CRUSADERS

Archie Action:
COSMO

Also, even though there might nominally be 3 "ongoing" titles (such as that is, for titles which rarely produce a new issue every 6 months or so) under the Archie Horror imprint, none of those titles take place in the same universe. You might also say that it's debateable as to whether even ARCHIE and THE ARCHIES are taking place in the same "universe".

So really, that's all Archie Comics publishes -- a bunch of different stand-alone comics which are independent and self-contained, and not related to any other titles.

*And by that I mean -- REGGIE AND ME was intended to be an ongoing title, but low preorders on the first couple of issues nixed that idea pretty fast, and it was downgraded to a 5-issue miniseries. That could happen to ANY of these announced-as-ongoing titles. Poor sales would result in turning it into a one-story-arc-only limited series, just enough to make up one trade collection.

Today (10-17):
Both of these digests have a cover price of $6.99 -- but the B&V Halloween Annual has 192 pages, and Archie & Me Digest #1 has only 128 pages.

BETTY & VERONICA HALLOWEEN ANNUAL #257 - Despite irishmoxie's complaint over the low incidence of true Halloween stories in the B&V Annual (which is a fair assessment), the overall quality of most of these story pages is pretty high, and I'd rate the contents as being between 70-80% "above average" stories. There's a fair amount of pages of Dan DeCarlo artwork, and a fair amount of pages of Dan Parent artwork, probably a higher percentageof those two artists than found in any other digest title (and seeing as how they are among my favorite of all the regular Archie artists, that is a very good thing). Of course there are also some Stan Goldberg and Jeff Shultz stories, as you would pretty much expect in any B&V digest. It has a good amount of variety too, with Sabrina, Josie, and Cheryl Blossom stories (by Holly G) in addition to the B&V stories, and Veronica and Betty solo stories. I don't have a clue why they moved the Josie and Cheryl stories from B&V Friends, where they formerly appeared regularly, to the regular B&V title, but it only makes this a better digest title. It's true that of the 192 pages in the digest, 14 of them are advertising pages, so that leaves 178 - and out of those, 2 of them are puzzle pages, which I just glance at briefly and skip over. There's also a 2-page Halloween Quiz (from one of the old B&V Spectacular magazine-style comics) -- but I actually enjoyed reading that -- and a 5-page feature on ideas for throwing a Halloween party, illustrated by Dan Parent (again, from one of those old B&V Spec's) that actually has some pretty good ideas, if you were thinking of throwing a Halloween Bash. Ironically, the few pages of Halloween-themed stories contained here are among the weakest stories in this issue. There were 2 or 3 of the older classic reprints that I'd rate as absolute gems, however. And best of all, no pages wasted on "Little" B&V stories by Dexter Taylor - those I always skip, so this digest contains virtually no wasted pages, apart from the obligatory ads and those 2 puzzle pages (that's actually a pretty low number of puzzle pages by Annual standards).

ARCHIE AND ME COMICS DIGEST #1 - Vegan Jughead was right about this one. It's among the worst digests Archie Comics has ever published. Oh, the new 5-pager written by Dan Parent and drawn by Jeff Shultz (nice to see new stories by him, BTW) is great. When Dan writes a classic Archie story, he's on-target 90% of the time or better, and all of the returning former classic Archie artists are turning in great work, in most cases some of the best art they've ever done. It's all downhill after those first 5 pages, though. This digest had, out of its 128 pages, 10 pages of ads, so that leaves 118 pages of stories. AND 23 of those pages were devoted to "Archie Babies" -- which I flipped through and didn't read. Hey, here's an idea... why not devote 15 to 24 pages in a digest title to stories about "Octogenarian Archie & Friends"?? Sound like something you'd want to read, eh? Well, frankly... even THAT would be more interesting to me than any of the reprints involving Baby, Little, or "The New Archies" versions of the characters. It's a complete waste of paper, as far as I'm concerned. That left me with 95 pages of story, and of those, most of them are pretty run-of-the-mill. I'd say LESS THAN HALF of those pages were above average stories, so considering the cover price here, and the lack of anything compelling me to buy this, I'd rate it as an absolute "NOT BUY". About the nicest thing I can say about the reprint pages is that at least they had the courtesy to skip the puzzle pages (but they could have put 23 of them in here instead of Archie Babies, and it wouldn't have made a difference to me). If I hadn't already pre-ordered issues #2 & #3, I'd probably skip them -- and if things follow the usual pattern, I'm pretty sure those issues will ALSO be filled with 23-page "Archie Babies" sections! Am I ever glad I didn't subscribe to this! UGH!

WEEK OF 10-11-17 to 10-17-17
WALT DISNEY COMICS & STORIES #740
BEST OF ARCHIE COMICS DLX ED HC VOL 02
WORLD OF ARCHIE COMIC DOUBLE DIGEST #72
HARLEY & IVY MEET BETTY & VERONICA #1 (of 6)
YOUR PAL ARCHIE #3 (of 5)
ARCHIE HALLOWEEN SPECTACULAR #1
HCF 2017 ARCHIE'S MADHOUSE MINICOMIC
HCF 2017 DONALD DUCK'S HALLOWEEN SCREAM #2 MINICOMIC
HCF 2017 CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST MINICOMIC
ATOMAHAWK #0
FIGHTING AMERICAN #1
THE TREMENDOUS TRUMP #1 (one-shot)
WONDER WOMAN #32
DETECTIVE COMICS #966
ACTION COMICS #989
RAGMAN #1 (of 6)
HCF 2017 DC SUPER HERO GIRLS SPEC ED
HCF 2017 JUNJI ITO SHIVER
HCF 2017 BATTLE ANGEL ALITA
ZOMBIES ASSEMBLE 2 #3 (of 4)
KINGSMAN RED DIAMOND #2 (of 6)
JIMMY'S BASTARDS #4
SPY SEAL #3 (of 4)
THE VISITOR: HOW AND WHY HE STAYED TP

Finished watching the rest of ARCHIE'S WEIRD MYSTERIES. Towards the end of the series there are a couple of 3-episode story arcs, one with Veronica getting a sunstone pendant and thinking that she's The Ender, destined to save the world by preventing the Eternal Night of the Vampires. This introduced a character named Scarlet Hellsing, who also appeared in some issues of the comic book series based on the animated series. The other 3-episode arc involves a time-travelling villain named Vinnie Wells, who steals a time-device invented by Dilton (don't ask how, but Vinnie's whole motivation stems from a desire to mooch money to buy nachos). The final episode of the 3 also features a time-travelling adult Archie Andrews, and a wilderness scout (in the year 1699) named Bob Montana who found (and thus founded) Riverdale (with some help from time-travelling Archie), as well as an homage to the very first Archie story where a 12 year-old Archie tries to show off by balancing on top of his bicycle seat, and meets Betty for the first time. Without a doubt, this was the best-written episode of the entire series. I almost expected Marshal January McAndrews of the Time Police to show up to help put an end to Vinnie's chrono-meddling. It very much felt like a plot from Jughead's Time Police, mixed with a little of the multiverse stuff from Life With Archie magazine.

Since then I've been going back and forth (one disc at a time) between the original SABRINA THE TEEN-AGE WITCH (1969, Filmation) and THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, which was an additional half-hour program created to expand Sabrina's show into an hour-long block when it spun off from THE ARCHIE COMEDY HOUR where it first appeared, in the same way that The Archie Comedy Hour was an expansion of the earlier half-hour THE ARCHIE SHOW (1968). On DVD, the shows were released at different times by different companies, each as a 3-disc set (16 half-hour episodes per series). As with the Archie cartoons appearing on The Archie Comedy Hour, SABRINA AND THE GROOVIE GOOLIES re-ran the earlier Sabrina animated episodes from The Archie Comedy Hour, while adding the new Groovie Goolies cartoon episodes (in which Sabrina also appears, but as a distinctly minor supporting character). The weird thing is, although the Goolies were an original creation of the Filmation Studios writers and animators, the copyright is still in the name of Archie Comic Publications (1970), which makes it odd to me that ACP never ever used the characters (not even once) in their comics. For some reason, Filmation felt that it was necessary to hyphenate the word "teen-age" in the title of Sabrina's cartoon, as opposed to the more common spelling "teenage". One of the songs from the Groovie Goolies was "Chick-A-Boom" which was later re-recorded by Dick Monda, who did the songs for the entire series, under the pseudonym "Daddy Dewdrop" and became a big hit (although now mostly forgotten, as are most one-hit wonders).

I read issue #3 (but I'm not going to talk about the stories and give any spoilers). It was good -- better even than the first two issues (which I liked). I could get used to this as an ongoing series, so it's kind of a drag that there are only going to be 2 more issues. Not that I really had any expectations of it bucking the current trend at ACP and being some kind of breakout title. Ah well. I guess 5 issues is better than none, and more than I could even really expect.

So I've been buying these variant cover versions of the regular issues, with part of a long connecting scene with artwork by Les McClane. I'm really only buying them (in addition to the regular, Dan Parent cover) to support the book, so the first couple I just bagged & boarded and filed away without even looking at them. But today I just happened to really be looking at #3, and there are quite a few characters in there, with a little story going on in the background if you look hard.

#1 - Sheila Wu and ? (could be Shrill, but it doesn't really look like her) are reading a fashion magazine with a cover story about Katy Keene, while Dilton holds an old issue of PEP (with The Shield on the cover) open, showing it to Midge and Moose. Behind them, Betty holds on to Archie's arm as they stroll through the parking lot (since when does Pop's Chok'lit Shoppe have a parking lot?) towards the door of Pop's. Behind them, Cricket O'Dell spots a piece of folding money on the ground, and behind her sitting on a wall, Salem is being doused by a little storm cloud (because he's sitting next to Jinx Malloy). Behind the wall, zombie Jughead and zombie Ethel are emerging from the trees behind January McAndrews, while behind them, Sabrina hovers on her broomstick, waving at Harvey Kinkle from outside his second-floor window. Behind Sabrina, Evilheart is flying towards a big tree in which Captain Hero is perched on a large branch. The tree is located in front of a house where we can see the tiny figures of Fred & Mary Andrews and Alice & Hal Cooper.

#2 - Betty and a smiling Archie have just entered through the door of Pop's and Betty is frowning when she sees Veronica waving at them (sharing a booth with Reggie, who's also frowning). At the booth behind them (to the left on the cover) sit RHS faculty Coach Clayton, Ms. Grundy, Prof. Flutesnoot and Mr. Weatherbee. Behind Betty & Archie, Pop is at the counter serving up a pile of hamburgers on a platter to Jughead, standing at the counter. Jughead has his back to Linda Moore and Wilbur Wilkin, sitting on counter stools, and Wilbur is looking off-cover to the right, sipping on a straw in a big milkshake, while Linda stares up at him with a forelorn look on her face. Behind them, outside Pop's back window, Sabrina carries Harvey off on her broomstick as below them, zombie Jughead and zombie Ethel and zombie Grundy advance behind zombie Weatherbee toward January McAndrews and Deputy Marshall Forsythe P. Jones (he's in uniform) of the Time Police. Fortunately, Pureheart the Powerful, patrolling overhead, has spotted the situation.

#3 - Zombies Weatherbee and Grundy are attacking Harvey Kinkle, as he dangles from Sabrina's broomstick by one hand, and the zombies attempt to grab his feet. Pureheart is keeping zombies Jughead & Ethel at bay while Time Police Jughead and January escape. Zombie Moose and zombie Midge are arriving to assist the other zombies, and Evilheart & Captain Hero are zooming down from the left to help Pureheart in battling them, while Superteen is about to land from above right behind Pureheart. There is a large TV monitor in front of the window (showing Josie and the Pussycats playing) and beneath the monitor outside the window we can see Chester and Mad Doctor Doom lurking behind some trees. Over at the left side of the cover we can see Laurie Lake sitting at the counter, sipping on a straw sharing that same milkshake that Wilbur was drinking on #2's cover. She has her back to Alec and is ignoring him, as he slouches on his counter stool, frowning. The stool to the right of Alec is unoccupied, but the next one is occupied by Trula Twyst (wearing a light blue U.G.A.J. t-shirt) as she eyes Jughead who's just strolled past her carrying his huge platter of hamburgers. Watch out, Juggie! You're heading into the middle of a food fight! Ginger Snapp is sitting at the counter in a yellow t-shirt, about to throw a big wad of what looks like (maybe) pizza dough? (There's another, much larger wad of the same stuff sailing over her head.) Sitting at booths in front of all this, Cheryl and Jason Blossom share a booth with Valerie Smith's brother Trev and Cheryl is handing a smirking Reggie a strawberry milkshake, as Reggie looks back over his shoulder to the right, at the booth occupied by Archie, who stares blissfully into Veronica's eyes as Betty sits opposite with arms folded and a look of extreme irritation on her face.