Virtually all of the Jughead-in-love stories date from the late 1980s onwards. You might find some before that where he's finagled into going on a date, but really hardly any where he shows real romantic feelings towards a girl. But still, that's 40-odd years' worth of Jughead stories.

I could swear they just edited out practically all of the Chuck Clayton stories from Riverdale High. 

She's Josie really deserved a full-sized hardcover collection, but I'll take what I can get from ACP in these lean times.

Quote from: Oldiesmann on December 18, 2021, 01:15:54 AMI still subscribe to one of the digests but that's about it. I don't buy much beyond that mainly because I don't have a lot of space to put them all at the moment (need to invest in some longboxes and get things more organized than large piles of comic books on my bookshelf and other areas).

Where do you get boxes to fit digest-size comics? I need to get some of those, and some for tankobon-size manga paperbacks. Right now I'm just using regular old Diamond boxes (the kind the distributor packs comics in to ship to retailers). Those can fit two rows of digests across, and I cut off an end flap of another box to divide the two rows. I just stand the boxes on their sides until I fill two stacks of rows with two different digest titles. But with all the Archie digests being in the Jumbo Comics size, it only takes a year or so to fill one box.

Manga paperbacks I just pack in rows using the lids from regular-sized comic boxes. It's not great because the lids are too shallow to completely cover the sides of the paperback. I guess I could cut a regular comic box down to the right size but it seems like such waste when you're paying for all that cardboard. It'd be great to have boxes that fit exactly and have their own lids or closing flaps, though.

I've searched in vain at department stores for plastic storage boxes to fit digests or tankobon-pb's, but they're always slightly off in size or have these rounded corners... frustrating.

Quote from: botolo on December 14, 2021, 08:42:43 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on December 13, 2021, 08:43:44 AMStill buying B&V digests and stuff in the "Classic Archie" format, including the floppy comics Betty & Veronica Friends Forever and Archie & Friends, but nothing based on the 2015 reboot or Riverdale. The only real exception to that general rule for me is Sabrina, whose chilling adventures (and their spinoffs like Madam Satan) I'm still following. I also liked Cosmo and Super Duck, but it looks like fringe stuff like that is past the point of publishing now.

There is, frankly, not a lot to say about most of the new 5-page stories. Back when ACP was still doing stories that filled an entire issue or a story arc of several issues, there was a lot more comment-worthy stuff going on.

I agree with you, the 5 page new stories are nothing exceptional. They are usually pretty boring and I am not a big fan of Dan
Parent's art. Having said this, it's always fun to go to my local newsstand or supermarket and buy a new digest.

That's where we'll have to agree to disagree... when I wrote "stories that filled an entire issue or a story arc of several issues", I am really thinking mostly about the stories (and longer arcs) that Dan Parent wrote & drew... I'd say about 75% of the comment-worthy ones, the most enjoyable ones. The only other thing of note back then was the long-running LIFE WITH ARCHIE (a.k.a. The Married Life) by Paul Kupperberg. Before that we have to go back a ways, to things like Craig Boldman & Rex Lindsey's JUGHEAD, or Holly G's JOSIE (in Archie & Friends), SABRINA or CHERYL BLOSSOM. All of that stuff came out in the period between 1997 and 2014. Dan Parent has had a few full-length one-shots or miniseries since then... and again, those are the kind of things that are most comment-worthy, because the only other things of substantial length have been reboots, about which I have almost nothing to say (in most cases I didn't even read them, or only one sample issue). The 5-page Classic Archie story plots just don't get very involved for the most part, so there's not much to say about them, except some are better than others.

Quote from: beatman10 on December 07, 2021, 08:47:36 PMI don't like what they have done with her personality and with the other characters.  Ethel was never shy, nor, I don't remember her ever being bullied by the others. If anything , Betty and Veronica tried to help her attract Jughead or other guys. In this story, Archie seems to be a loser. Even Betty doesn't want him. And Jughead is totally a jerk and unlikable. The only two likeable characters are Ms. Grundy and Moose. Anyone else have feelings about Big Ethel Energy?

This is a more general issue I have with any of the rebooted Archie comics and Riverdale. I saw the ads for the series printed in the digests, and just did not recognize her as the same Ethel Muggs character.

So yes, in the Classic Archie mode, Big Ethel really WAS "the ugly joke girl who chases after Jughead" and it's kind of too late for apologies... because changing that makes her a different character entirely. The world today does not accept a gag-based comic filled with outrageous caricatures, so a rebooted Ethel must become a character with dignity and agency to modern readers. I guess their idea of that is to present the male characters as loser-jerks that Ethel can eventually triumph over somehow. Moose somehow escapes that because he's another example of a Classic Archie joke caricature ("big stupid massively strong, sometimes dangerously aggressive jock") that could be taken as maligning some real type of person, such as someone with mental retardation or a learning disability, or anger-management issues.

EDIT  Out of curiosity I had a look at the 1st webisode just to see, even though I knew pretty conclusively ahead of time this wasn't for me. And your criticism seems well-founded, with most commentators complaining about the characters being different than what they expected. With these New Archie reboots, even though they're not all pieces of a common shared-universe, I've come to expect it's a bunch of writers who have their own ideas about what sort of stories they want to tell, and change the Archie-derived avatars to fit that story.

Still buying B&V digests and stuff in the "Classic Archie" format, including the floppy comics Betty & Veronica Friends Forever and Archie & Friends, but nothing based on the 2015 reboot or Riverdale. The only real exception to that general rule for me is Sabrina, whose chilling adventures (and their spinoffs like Madam Satan) I'm still following. I also liked Cosmo and Super Duck, but it looks like fringe stuff like that is past the point of publishing now.

There is, frankly, not a lot to say about most of the new 5-page stories. Back when ACP was still doing stories that filled an entire issue or a story arc of several issues, there was a lot more comment-worthy stuff going on.

The whole thing with Jughead romancing girls in the late '80s just strikes me as reactionary homophobia, like they were afraid at that time that the whole "woman-hater" angle made Jughead look gay. So it was just like when in the 1950s they introduced Batwoman and Batgirl into the comics, to sidetrack any insinuations of Batman & Robin being gay. I'd say the fact that it was happening for Archie Comics in the late 1980s had a lot to do with ACP trying to transition from a greatly-reduced newsstand-distribution market to the direct-market distribution of comic book shops.

Quote from: Asaki on October 28, 2021, 09:38:04 PMJughead's Time Machine was really good too, even though I usually disapprove of [spoiler]Jughead breaking character over a girl[/spoiler].

It wasn't just January McAndrews in Jughead's Time Police, though... it was a whole thing going on for Jughead in his regular title in the late '80s. He was also caught up in a love triangle between Debbie and Joani.

It's shocking how random they are about some things at ArchieCo. 

You'd think they'd have digitized all of the Archie & Friends issues by now... there were only 159 of them (and the last 3 issues were all-reprint), so it isn't like one of those series that ran for hundreds of issues. There were a lot of good stories in that run (and Sabrina and Josie & the Pussycats, too).

And yes... GCDb is also very very spotty about indexing Archie Comics.

So... checking this out, it appears that the Sabrina Halloween Spooktacular came out between A&F #6 and 7 (and if I'm not mistaken, those A&F issues may be the only appearances of the Carneys outside of the Spooktacular and their own one-shot comic).

The early team of Bill Golliher and Dan Parent came up with some off-the-wall concepts in the early 1990s. Jughead's Diner, Sabrina at Gravestone Heights, The Carneys and (I think) Archie 3000 were all from the brain (or brains) of one or both of them.

Quote from: Asaki on October 24, 2021, 10:19:41 PMWould love to see all of these gathered into a collection, but for now, I'm just trying to track down the digital reprints, maybe make my own compilation.

Your timing is fortuitous. They just recently started reprinting the Sabrina at Gravestone Heights stories in Betty & Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest. #297 has the first two stories, "Double Date" and "Mummy Dearest" (although curiously printed in reverse order). S@GH had appeared before in the Sabrina section of B&VJCD in random issues (there is always a Sabrina section), so you could check backwards, but I suspect they will probably cycle through them all in upcoming issues.

Ah, someone else likes Toni Topaz. 

I always wanted to see a Jughead story where Toni and Trula have some kind of serious interaction (with Jughead caught in the middle, of course). Ideally written by Craig Boldman, but if they can't get him, then Tom DeFalco.

I wonder what Rex Lindsey is doing these days.

Somehow I completely missed this album when it was released last October in the middle of the whole COVID epidemic... which is still happening, somehow... I don't want to talk about it.

It's a major release for fans of The Archies. While the first disc represents sort of a "Ron Dante's Greatest Hits", with four tracks from The Archies (three familiar tracks, plus the all-new recording "Sugar Sugar 2020 Euro Dance Remix"), three taken from The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, two from the 1972 vinyl album The Amazing Spider-Man: A Rockomic!, plus five of Dante's commercial jingles, a couple of singles from Ron and the Cufflinks, and a few cover tunes.

The second disc is the big surprise, though. It contains previously unreleased songs from ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE -- 9 full-length tunes (meaning more than two minutes running time), plus the Funhouse opening and closing themes, and 18 short recordings (meaning between 29 and 53 seconds) taken from the Funhouse "Dance of the Week" segment.

PLUS cover art from Dan Parent featuring Betty and Veronica dancing in the background, which is a neat touch.