I actually read ARCHIE #20-22 a couple of weeks ago, just to see what all the hubbub was all about. "Over the Edge" seems like a pretty cheesy attempt at some soap-opera theatrics, troweling a copious layer of angst on top of the usual behavior of Archie, Reggie, Veronica, and Betty.

Reggie acts like a jerk as usual. He doesn't care so much about taking Archie's car as just making him look like a dweeb in front of Veronica, and Archie, predictably, is just dumb enough to fall right into his trap. He'd just as soon do something both stupid and dangerous (not that there's one chance in a million of his car beating Reggie's in a street race) if he thinks that there's even the slightest possibility it might save his reputation from looking like a "loser" in Veronica's eyes. If that's all Veronica cares about Archie, she's not worth the bother.

But of course if either of the idiots responsible for creating this dangerous game of chicken were to suffer as a result of it, we'd just say... "Serves him right for being such a total dick" or "What kind of idiot cares so much about his 'image' that he gets suckered into something like that?" and that they got what they deserved. But of course that would be too easy, so Archie not using his brain and acting stupid results in poor Betty panicking and not using her brain and acting stupid to try to save him... and of course, blameless as she is, she's the one who had to wind up suffering for it.

Because it's always the innocent and blameless who have to suffer for the jerks and dumbasses of the world, who somehow or other always seem to lead a charmed life. Now in the real world that would be a life-changing event for both Archie and Reggie, and either wind up destroying them, or wising them up and straightening them out, making them re-evaluate their whole outlook and behavior. But we can be pretty sure that isn't going to happen here, because their characters are already written to be what they are... Reggie will always act like a jerk, and Archie will always be good-intentioned, but stupid enough to act like a selfish chump anyway.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on August 04, 2017, 06:50:08 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 01, 2017, 06:02:35 PM
"Veronica in Texas" was just reprinted last month in one of the B&V digests. I enjoyed it, but didn't learn a thing about Texas. Neither did Veronica, since she spent most of the story with concussion-induced amnesia laboring under the delusion that she was "Dusty Marlowe, Rodeo Star" (from a novel she'd been reading on the plane just before she hit her head due to unexpected turbulence). As "Dusty", she dyed her hair red, which made her look amazingly like Cheryl Blossom (admittedly not much of a concern for readers in 1991, when the story was first published in VERONICA #17). I kinda miss Lady Smitty.

Oh, I need to get a hold of this!

It's in Betty & Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #255.

Which, by the way, doesn't look like this issue that was solicited a few months ago...


Instead it looks like this:


It officially went on sale July 26th, but I think my subscription copy arrived almost a week early. This is another one of those "switcharoo solicits" that hardly ever gets mentioned, but in the last couple of months there were a spate of them (I think the revised cover art originally appeared on a solicitation for Archie's Funhouse digest, which seems to have skipped an issue, or maybe I'm thinking of the previous B&V Friends Jumbo Comics Digest #254), culminating in the announcement that Jughead & Archie Double Digest was being cancelled and replaced by Archie & Me Comics Digest. It should still be on sale at Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart brick & mortars, as well as wherever digital comics are sold.

At any rate, various digest shipping dates as solicited got changed, as well as the contents, page count, and cover art... so things appear to be in a volatile state in digestland. The last time it happened on that scale was a few months before both Archie's Funhouse and Jughead & Archie got cut back from 10 times a year to only six times a year.

Quote from: irishmoxie on August 03, 2017, 03:41:44 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 01, 2017, 06:02:35 PM
"Veronica in Texas" was just reprinted last month in one of the B&V digests. I enjoyed it, but didn't learn a thing about Texas. Neither did Veronica, since she spent most of the story with concussion-induced amnesia laboring under the delusion that she was "Dusty Marlowe, Rodeo Star" (from a novel she'd been reading on the plane just before she hit her head due to unexpected turbulence). As "Dusty", she dyed her hair red, which made her look amazingly like Cheryl Blossom (admittedly not much of a concern for readers in 1991, when the story was first published in VERONICA #17). I kinda miss Lady Smitty.

Maybe they got feedback after Veronica in Australia and Veronica in Africa where they bang you over the head with factoids about those places.

All of the Veronica travel stories were like that, as far as I can remember. This one contained a couple of insignificant statistics about Dallas and Houston, but they didn't really register because they were just mentioned in passing, and had no bearing on the plot. The only factoid that had any real bearing on the story was the actual purpose of rodeo clowns (to distract the bull when the rider is thrown and in danger of being trampled).

I guess the "Around the World with Veronica" stories were losing steam with readers by that time, and the following issue's "Veronica in the Bahamas" (#18) turned out to be the last. I'd still like to see them all collected in one big trade paperback.

Just a suggestion, SAGG... you can take it or leave it. The albums are unusually large, which makes them harder to navigate if someone's looking for some particular type of story. Might I suggest you break those large albums up into smaller albums, sorted by whatever means seems to make the most sense to you? By characters, artists, decades, or whatever... and then name them accordingly. If all you did was just to break those 2 big albums down into smaller ones of around 250-300 pages it would be a lot easier to navigate, even if you didn't try to organize the stories in any way.

Right now what you've got is 2 monolithic ARCHIE UltraMEGA-Ginormous-palooza 1100-1200+ Page Comics Digests.

Quote from: Nikocruz on August 02, 2017, 06:11:27 AM
Is there another way to do this?

They say there's more than one way to skin a cat. But why would you want to? It only serves as an exercise in wanton cruelty, since there's no value in catskins.

GHOST STATION ZERO #1 (of 4)
SLASHER #3
JOHN CARPENTER'S TALES OF SCIENCE FICTION: VAULT #1 (of 3)
QUEEN EMERALDAS HC GN VOL 01

Today, August 1st:
STREET FIGHTER SWIMSUIT SPECIAL 2017 (one-shot)
LOBSTER JOHNSON: MANGEKYO (one-shot)
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS: HERO KILLERS #3
SUPER SECRET ROBOT CLUB #1
GALAKTIKON #1 (of 6)
HILLBILLY #7 - in 3-D! (glasses not included)
NEW GODS SPECIAL #1 (one-shot)
LOONEY TUNES #238
STAR TREK: WAYPOINT #6 (of 6)
PREDATOR HUNTERS #4 (of 5)

"Veronica in Texas" was just reprinted last month in one of the B&V digests. I enjoyed it, but didn't learn a thing about Texas. Neither did Veronica, since she spent most of the story with concussion-induced amnesia laboring under the delusion that she was "Dusty Marlowe, Rodeo Star" (from a novel she'd been reading on the plane just before she hit her head due to unexpected turbulence). As "Dusty", she dyed her hair red, which made her look amazingly like Cheryl Blossom (admittedly not much of a concern for readers in 1991, when the story was first published in VERONICA #17). I kinda miss Lady Smitty.

Quote from: chrisophical on July 30, 2017, 08:13:35 PM
That's true, just not in the city like Dallas

Point taken. I've never been to Dallas, and so I don't have much of a mental image of that city, particularly what a typical residential area looks like. Just what I tend to see on TV shows, which is like a helicopter flyover of the downtown area.

Quote from: chrisophical on July 30, 2017, 11:22:35 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 27, 2017, 04:26:17 AM

Quote from: chrisophical on July 25, 2017, 07:08:57 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 25, 2017, 06:48:06 PM

Quote from: chrisophical on July 25, 2017, 05:50:26 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 23, 2017, 03:27:41 PM
Well, he's the best male character. Hands down. Not even close. I think I'd rate the Boldman/Lindsey version as #1, with a tie for 2nd place between Samm Schwartz and Fernando Ruiz. All three versions are slightly different characters. Dan Parent's version would rate higher probably, if he'd done more Jughead solo stories, but I haven't seen all that many crop up. I don't know what I'm going to do now that JUGHEAD & ARCHIE digest is cancelled. Probably have to start buying more back issues, if I can find them.

What kind of monster tosses a box of Archie Comics on the side of the road?

It's crazy, I know! There were like 20-30 digests in the box, and they decided to just throw them all away!

I'm trying to visualize some sort of situation where they were bungee'd to some roof or trunk rack on a car (or maybe a motorcycle or scooter?), but even that seems pretty unlikely...

Yeah, my guess was that it was a "parents threw it out after the kids grew up" kind of situation, but who knows.

I guess when you said "found by the side of the road" I was visualizing something like... by the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere. I guess if the road was in front of a house, and the curb is where you'd put out garbage for pickup, then the "parents threw them out" theory makes the most sense.

Yeah it wasn't as strange as finding them abandoned in a field or something... Now that would be really weird!

Well, Texas is really big. So in my imagination, at least, that includes a lot of miles of roads that don't run past the front lawns of houses, where boxes could fall off the back of pickup trucks or something like that.

7/28-7/30:
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE BACK-TO-SCHOOL ANNUAL #27
THE SEARCHERS TP VOL 02: APOSTLES OF MERCY
TIME LINCOLN: FATE OF THE UNION TP
TRUMP VS. TIME LINCOLN #1 (one-shot)
VALERIAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION HC VOL 01

Quote from: rusty on July 29, 2017, 09:51:10 AM
GPF    http://www.gpf-comics.com


Moving on to the rest of the DC titles and then I'll be almost up to date.  Just the Free Comic Book Day titles and what has accumulated in the last couple of weeks will be left.


Astro City
Everafter
Frostbite
Red Thorn
Unfollow
Flintstones
Future Quest
Scooby Doo (several titles)
Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77

Thanks Rusty. After all of that, you still have time to read webcomics as well? I suppose it helps that you don't have to work during school vacations. Did you get Batman '66 Meets the Legion?

Quote from: SAGG on July 28, 2017, 06:31:07 PM
Very good, longstanding web comics to me. There's also GPF....

GPF?   Link?


As an aside, by FAR the biggest issue that I have with digital comics is that the basic page dimensions of a floppy comic were never designed for reading in a digital format. The default "real estate" of a true digital comic is the landscape-mode page/screen, the same as computer and television monitors. Print format comics are exactly the opposite, using portrait mode "display" for their page composition, so any page composition that stacks tiers of panels taller than they are wide is automatically crap by definition for reading on a monitor display. Tablets can compensate for portrait mode, but any screen display that is smaller diagonally than a standard-format floppy comic is automatically inferior. Desktop monitors can display the portrait mode page if they're at least as tall as a standard floppy, but either there's a lot of wasted screen real estate or the display needs to be 2 pages side by side. Either way the two formats are just plain incompatible for dividing into panels in such a way that they'll still read left-to-right, up-to-down in both the portrait and landscape format unless you adopt a very rigid, unvarying grid of same-sized rectangular panels that can be stacked in different ways for either format. I don't want wasted screen real estate, I don't want a 2-column (2 side-by-side pages) screen, and I don't want to pan, scroll or zoom the page, either -- just a single click or swipe to go on to the next page. The basic default layout of the single page is incompatible between the two mediums of floppy print comic and digital comic. Digital comics' natural analog to print comics is the Sunday newspaper comics section half-page format. There's nothing you can do with older comic book art that's just being scanned in the digital age, but newer comics being created now need to fit a landscape page format before I'll adopt them. In short, my disdain of digital comics is based on the fact that they are virtual "fake" floppy comics -- comics which were never created by design for their native display format, the landscape-mode monitor. Until that changes they'll always be inferior to comics that were designed for the printed page, and the only real use I'll have for digital comics are for those comics I essentially cannot get by any other means: webcomics, English-language scanslations of manga not otherwise available in English, and older public domain comics which would be prohibitively expensive (if you could even find them) to collect as back issues.

Quote from: irishmoxie on July 27, 2017, 07:35:56 PM
Haven't been able to get into any webcomics. It feels like they're making it up as they go along. I prefer strong narratives. Like someone writes a page then passes it onto someone else and so on. It's too disjointed for me even when I read a bunch of days at once.

That's because the rhythm of the daily (or X-times weekly) strip is a different discipline -- they're really not meant to be read in clumps. Each strip has to deliver something as a single unit, but to the degree that there's continuity there is some overlap where information gets repeated. There's nothing stopping someone from serializing a regular comic book story one-page-a-day, but you don't really get anything out of reading them that way. Regular comic books aren't written that way at all, so they usually read terribly that way, one page a day.

Daily strip continuities can have strong narratives if the story is planned and paced out in advance, but they still have to perform the double duty of delivering something with each daily strip. Because the reading experience is cheap (or free) and casual, the storyline has a chance to gradually draw a reader in and involve them in a more serious way. Regular comic books don't do that because there's no casual reading phase before committing your $3-4 for a 20-page chapter. You just roll the dice based on someone else's reviews and take a gamble, but the same criticism applies to serialized periodical comic books versus original graphic novels that are meant to be read as a complete unit, not in chapter installments. Stories have to be structured somewhat differently to be broken down into regular 20-page chapters where the reader doesn't get to move on to the next chapter until a month later.

Innumerable interviews with creators prove that the "making it up as you go along" principle largely applies to most series fiction (regardless of the frequency of publication) as well as to daily strips. It varies greatly from creator to creator, but many reveal that the story they set out to tell took unexpected turns over time during the process of writing and drawing that were never planned. Letting a story evolve organically during the process of working to a deadline can sometimes produce fortuitous results, and sometimes not. Some creators prefer to hold themselves to a well-organized structure of pre-planned story beats, while others have no more than a very general sense of direction and certain ideas they want to incorporate, and they prefer to let the story unfold during the actual scripting/drawing phase with more spontaneity. We often read anecdotes about characters "writing themselves" or continuities taking twists different that what the author originally had in mind, in the process of creating them.

Historically speaking (ignoring the current popularity of archival hardcover reprints) daily strips were always subjected to an editing process to read better when reprinted in a collected format. Panels were dropped to eliminate redundancies (or sometimes added, or the art was extended in an existing panel) or resized, text captions were dropped or added, dialogue in balloons sometimes altered. That's exactly what Brad Guigar does with his print collections of the EVIL INC. ANNUAL REPORT to make the story flow smoother in collected format.

The problem with serialized periodical comic books (whether in digital or print form) is the question of how do you get someone who's never read the comic to gamble $3-4 on it? If you're familiar with the creator(s') previous body of work, that's one thing, or if the characters are at least familiar to some degree, even if the particular story or creative team isn't. Then there are reviews. But there's still no means of mass exposure to create a desire for the product, a fact compounded when the creative team and/or characters are unfamiliar to the consumer. There's no "try before you buy", and even worse, you have to be looking for the comic (in a comic shop or online) in the first place. Webcomics share the latter problem to the degree of -- how do you discover them in the first place?, but once you do, at least you get to take it for a trial spin. It's a real problem with only about 2000 or so comic book stores in North America, and it's one of the things FCBD and Halloween ComicFest are trying to address, but those "free trial" comics are only available a couple of days a year out of 365, and not every series gets a freebie issue. Archie Comics has digital freebies, which is really helpful in conjunction with a small group of characters that share a "house style" of art and writing. The wider comics market has a real diversity of styles in art, writing and story concepts, but since comics aren't cheap, that makes blind sampling too risky for most consumers.

Dedicated comic shops and the non-returnable direct market came into existence as a haven for the cognoscenti, the experienced and pre-sold buyer, typically a knowledgeable reader/collector with distinct (if narrow) preferences and tastes who was willing to devote significant effort to the hobby. Once the mass-distributed, cheap & disposable comic book withdrew from exposure to the public in the retail establishments of the wider culture, casual readership of comics was decimated and the comics publishing industry changed in ways that made the medium less accessible and less welcoming to newcomers, particularly with the shrinking of the market for all-ages comics, which the comics publishing industry depended on for the seeding of the next generation of comic book consumers. The more typical neophyte entering the world of comics reading/collecting today is likely to need some sort of older or more experienced relative or friend as a mentor/guide if it's going to turn out to be more than a passing interest.

Been reading some webcomics. DICK TRACY dailies and Sundays from 2012-2013 by Joe Staton and Mike Collins at gocomics.com/dicktracy, and EVIL INC. from 2006 (mostly daily) by Brad Guigar at evil-inc.com/archive/.

Yes, the pages are slow to load because of all the annoying ads. That's entirely by design. You get something for free, but you either get it in small, "wait-for-it" measured doses, or you decide it's worth paying for a "hurry-it-up" digital download collection. They're really meant to be read as they're posted, one per day. If you do it that way, you bookmark the page, and once a day you're in, you're out, you move on. I'm convinced that's entirely the right model for digital comics. Digital floppy singles are not. There's no incentive to buy those unless you're already a fan of them through prior reading, but there's no free bait, no lure to get you hooked. Online is free but slow, not conducive to immersive reading. If the comic you're reading hooks you, and starts reeling you in as a reader, you are a fish on a line, fighting the desire to read these webcomics faster, without annoying ads and waiting for pages to load, so you break down and spend a few bucks for a digitally-downloaded collection, or a few bucks more for a print copy. Or you're fine with the casual "read-a-few-then-call-it-quits-for-now" experience.