I sometimes wonder if Image isn't actually publishing more titles than DC. Most of them don't come out nearly as often, but they do publish a heck of a lot of titles.

Quote from: terrence12 on July 12, 2017, 12:30:39 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 11, 2017, 08:40:40 PM

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on July 11, 2017, 02:17:49 PM
I have no idea but since Jughead: The Hunger will be drawn by Pat and Tim Kennedy instead of Hack or Francavilla, it has a decent shot at actually sticking to a regular publishing schedule.

As long as it isn't written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. That probably has more to do with the 2-issues a year releases of AWA and ChAoS than Hack and Francavilla.

Which in other words bimonthly

Bi-monthly is every 2 months, terrence. Not even close. Twice a year is bi-annually. But that would be if either of those two titles came out twice a year. Last I checked, it was more like both AWA and ChAoS were coming out ONCE a year. What I really meant was that together, there are only about 2 issues of Archie Horror titles released every year -- one issue of AWA, and one of ChAoS.

WEEK OF 07-12-17:
BIG BANG UNIVERSE #2 & 3
UNCLE SCROOGE #432
RICK & MORTY: POCKET LIKE YOU STOLE IT #1 (of 5)
KILL OR BE KILLED #10
X-MEN BLUE #7
DETECTIVE COMICS #960
DARK DAYS: THE CASTING #1 (one-shot)
GREEN LANTERN/PLANET OF THE APES #6 (of 6)
BUG: THE ADVENTURES OF FORAGER #2 (of 6)
GREEN HORNET '66 MEETS THE SPIRIT #1 (of 5)
DOC SAVAGE: THE RING OF FIRE #4 (of 4)
JUSTICE INC: FACES OF JUSTICE #1 (of 4)
KISS/VAMPIRELLA #2 (of 5)
GWAR: ORGASMAGEDDON #2 (of 4)
MIGHTY MOUSE #2
GUMBY #1
MICRONAUTS: WRATH OF KARZA #3 (of 5)
ZOMBIES ASSEMBLE #0

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on July 11, 2017, 02:17:49 PM
I have no idea but since Jughead: The Hunger will be drawn by Pat and Tim Kennedy instead of Hack or Francavilla, it has a decent shot at actually sticking to a regular publishing schedule.

As long as it isn't written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. That probably has more to do with the 2-issues a year releases of AWA and ChAoS than Hack and Francavilla.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on July 10, 2017, 08:26:33 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 09, 2017, 12:52:03 AM
And yet Archie Comics still manages to hoodwink people into spending $3.99 for a comic book with 20 pages of story (that's 20 cents a page, in case nobody's doing the math).

I used to pay less than that when buying the floppies at TFAW, but then there was the shipping on top of that. I'd end up paying around $7 for a floppy issue. After November, I just quit buying comics.

I don't blame you. If you can't get to a comic shop in your area that carries them, it's asking too much. I quit getting cable TV and going to movies (mostly) because they cost so much. But honestly, part of the reason was to save that money for comics instead. Most people would just give up the comics.

Quote from: rusty on July 10, 2017, 09:18:41 AM
Maybe the first issue has a lot more new material  than normal and thus costs more.  I can hope, anyway.

I had the very same thought. It does seem a little too good to be true, but as you say, we always can hope. I've been saying that they should have been doing this right along, as the floppy format Archie titles started being cancelled one by one  -- move those same pages of new stories into the digest titles. They should have started doing that a decade ago.

Sure, they all have new 5-page stories now, but 5 pages of new material just isn't enough, to make a difference in motivating someone to buy digests that cost between 5 and 8 dollars. Twenty pages pages of new material, maybe... if the potential customer is at least slightly interested in the reprinted stories. Maybe someone at ACP is willing to experiment a little bit to see whether NEW Archie stories in the classic style can attract more readers outside of the direct market.

On further reflection though -- if they're not ballyhooing the fact that it contains a significant number of pages of new material, it does seem unlikely. The other thing that I just remembered is that there was a brief time when some of the digests had a significant amount of new pages, and when that was the case they also had covers that showed a scene from the new story, and since ARCHIE AND ME COMICS DIGEST #1 has the more generic-type cover illustration, I'm going to say it looks even less likely that there may be a long new story in it.

It also occurs that this is the first we've seen of October's solicitations, and who knows if other ACP titles might not turn out to reflect a similar rise in cover prices. I've been expecting the standard floppy comic to go to a $5 cover price any time now. Another possibility is that either the cover price or the page count cited in that news story might turn out to be a typo.

YES!! _*<-- (If there were a smiley for 'tears of joy' it would go right here.)

I was beginning to despair that Sitcomics had given up. I know there are a lot more profitable avenues of endeavor that you could be spending your time and effort on, so it has to be a true labor of love, and for that I thank you, sir.

September can't come fast enough! I am so looking forward to reading the next Super Suckers binge book!

Quote from: terrence12 on July 09, 2017, 11:29:17 PM
But still, What do you think if Archie Comics is being sold by IDW in case the former was about to go bankrupt due to low sales and low ratings on the TV show ,Think about it  IDW will make a new comedy period piece on Archie where it will take place in the 40's and 50's since those eras were considered Archie's popular period.

IDW is one of the existing companies that would be the best custodians of the Archie Comics legacy (the other candidates would be Dark Horse or Fantagraphics). Aside from appealing to collectors and those who are appreciative of comic books of the past, I can't see any sort of new floppy comic format series set in the 1940s or 1950s working, though. Its appeal is far too limited. Anything set in the past is a very tough sell in the current comic marketplace. A modified version of that approach, something like what was done with Batman the Animated Series, which is to create a sort of 'timeless' world where artifacts and fashions of the past coexist, blended with some more modern things (like computers and phones), might be more acceptable to the current comics market.

Still, the recent discontinuation of IDW's floppy comic versions of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Walt Disney's Comics & Stories might be an omen -- IDW is replacing those floppy comic titles with more modern, less traditional, spins on the classic Disney characters, and converting WDC&S to a $7.95 prestige/bookshelf-format (squarebound, 68 page, slick cardstock-covered) comic, and combining Mickey & Donald into one comic in the same format, re-testing their acceptance in the marketplace on a quarterly schedule. There are definitely some parallels to be drawn between the classic Disney comics and classic Archie comics.

If anything though, I'm more and more convinced that what works for the comic shop/comic book collector audience does not work for the expansion of comics into the general marketplace. The idea of getting a 20-page continuity (that isn't usually even a complete story in itself) for $4 is just not conducive to reaching out to the many potential comics readers out in the real world. NO retailers want to carry that product except for comic shop retailers (because they are pre-motivated sellers), and it's necessary for genres other than action/adventure type comic books to find those readers outside of the insular culture of comic book fandom. Casual comics readership needs to become a real possibility, with easy accessibility to the product, complete done-in-one stories, and a product with more pages that looks and feels like a substantial entertainment experience (that is more likely to be perceived by the average person as good value for money) for the comics reading experience to be considered viable by the average reader who hasn't been immersed in decades of comic book culture.

Since comic book collectors have come to accept the floppy comic format, and indeed prefer it, as the format of choice, they are completely blind to the many detractions it holds for the average person. The idea of needing to get the next issue, and the next, and the next... before you have a complete story.  The very fact that no retailers outside of comic book store owners want to carry that format ought to have been telling the comic book industry that, 30 or more years ago, but it was easier for publishers to persist in producing the same-old, same-old, as long there remained a rabid cult audience which demanded that very format for comics, because decades of programming made them comfortable with the thing they were most familiar with. The floppy comic was a good and economically-viable model for casual readers for a few decades, but has grown increasingly less so since at least the 1970s, and the industry just doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that the price-point/page-count/accessibility of purchase (non-direct distribution) issue is the one biggest thing that CAN be changed to get comics back out of the comic shop and into the real world of average readers.

Quote from: terrence12 on July 09, 2017, 01:01:41 PM
That's true though people will probably ignore the digest and just look online at previous issues instead,Since Digest are probably outdated.

When you say "people", you assume they all think like you do, and love comics in the "floppy comic format" only. Comics readers outside of comic book store consumers have no special attachment to that format. "Outdated" is just an opinion. It means nothing. What's important is that these "outdated" digests are selling to, and being read by, far more people than the current "modern" ARCHIE floppy comic book. Because they're being sold in stores where people are going to buy things anyway, not to collectors making lists of what comics they want and making special trips to a special store to purchase that one type of product. Those "outdated" readers (many of whom are kids, or the parents of kids) probably won't be reading their comics online. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's a habit that gets passed down from a parent to a child, and/or a purchase that gets made for a child by a parent in a lot of cases. For many of those, these would be the only comics they see outside of a newspaper comic section.

Otherwise why waste the company's money on the 48 printers' bills they have to pay every year to put them out? Couldn't they spend the same money on bills for printing floppy comics instead? But of course that would cost even more, because then they have to fill another 15 pages of comics with new material that needs to be paid for -- for an audience in comic book stores, that doesn't really care about Archie anyway, new or old.

It's funny how those digests keep getting recycled into variant formats like Archie Giant Comics or Archie 1000-Page Comics digests, and this is a recent phenomenon that's only happened in the last 3-4 years. I would guess that's because bookstore and chain store customers wanted more and bigger Archie digests, and digests that would have a shelf-life beyond the next issue. Judging by the number of them released so far, you can't argue that that's probably THE company's biggest success of recent years, in terms of pure profit.

Quote from: terrence12 on July 09, 2017, 05:07:52 AM
Then this will be the end of Archie comics unless there is hope maybe Goldwater would sell the company to IDW known for their best licensed and they will make the Archie series as a comedy Period piece series set in the 40's to 50's since the series is known then or I could be wrong.

No, I said "IF these titles, collectively, represent what Archie Comics as a publisher is depending on for its profitability and survival, they are indeed in big, big trouble."

Are ACP's floppy comics titles its primary source of revenue as a company? No, I don't believe that's true. Floppy comic sales are the only sales we know with any degree of certainty, because of Diamond Comics' sales lists, and because Diamond distributes nearly all the floppy comic books sold to retailers. They're reporting those because that is the format of comics that is most important to COMIC BOOK STORES. Trade paperbacks and hardcover sales are also important to comic book stores (and Diamond also reports those), but still not as much as floppy comics sales. The relative importance of those formats is different, depending on whether you're a comic shop retailer or a comic book publisher. Trade and hardcover collections are sold in many more places than just comic book stores. Archie digests are sold in many more locations than just comic book stores. Then there are digital comic sales, which are also important to a publisher, but only to a retailer as far as it eats into his print comic sales. Publishers also derive income from the licensing and merchandising of their company-owned intellectual properties.

Quote from: terrence12 on July 09, 2017, 07:21:01 AM
Maybe I guess the reason Diamond doesn't add Digests into their stats is because they think Digest are just relics of the past for which they are.

It has nothing to do with any prejudicial attitude towards the digest format on the part of Diamond Comics. They distribute hundreds of products every single week, but they don't produce a monthly sales report detailing the sales on every single item they distribute.

It's much simpler than that. They only list sales for the top 300+ or so publications (and there is a separate list for trade collections) that they distributed every month, so things that sold fewer copies fall off the bottom of the list, because that data becomes irrelevant when the numbers get too small. Archie's digests aren't on Diamond's sales reports lists because they sell very poorly -- in comic book shops -- compared to other comics they carry. So yes, the digests sell even worse than those floppy comic titles ACP is cancelling in comic book stores. The purpose of Diamond reporting their sales list is so that comic shop retailers can know which comics are selling well (or not so well) in stores other than their own, which would help them make decisions about which comics they should preorder (or RE-order) from Diamond, and in what quantities. If Diamond were to report sales on every single product they distribute, the list would be thousands of items long, with some products selling less than 1000 units.

But Archie's digests (unlike their floppy-format comic books) aren't dependent on Diamond Comic Distributors for the majority of their sales, because Diamond sells its products mainly to independent comic shops -- and there are only about 2000 or so of those stores in North America. Archie digests are mainly sold in other diverse retail chain stores, where they sell much better than they do in comic book stores.

Digests don't register in sales for comic book shops, which is why there's no sales data for them, which comes only from Diamond Comics' statistics. The vast majority of those digests are being sold NOT in comic shops, but at various retail outlets, or direct from ACP through subscriptions, and there is no sales data from those methods of distribution that is available to the public. On the other hand, Diamond's sales statistics for floppy comics reliably account for more than 90% of ALL sales of printed copies.

BETTY AND VERONICA #1 sold very well in July 2016. It sold 70,830 copies according to Diamond's sales data. B&V #2 didn't do nearly as well as #1 in November 2016, selling only 19,794 copies. STILL much better than ARCHIE #20, though... But that is a massive drop in sales from one issue to the next. We don't yet have sales data for B&V #3, which arrived in comic shops only last month, but I'll bet I can guess that it sold less than #2. We also need to take into account that B&V was a massively expensive comic book title for ACP to produce... by ACP's standards. There was a HUGE amount of overhead cost in hiring Adam Hughes. There doesn't seem to be much point in speculating about the future of that title, since we already know that issue #3 was the last to be written & drawn by Adam Hughes. No issue #4 has yet been solicited by ACP (and may never be). Certainly the lack of Adam Hughes would affect future sales in a negative direction, so who could predict whether this could still be a viable reboot?

Quote from: terrence12 on July 09, 2017, 01:02:37 AM

So,If you what you are saying is true then the other Archie reboot titles will end this year living only the reboot Archie which will probably end in about a year or two.

I guess you haven't been following too closely.

REGGIE AND ME ended with issue #5 in May 2017.
JUGHEAD ended with issue #16 in June 2017.
JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS will conclude with issue #9, expected in August 2017.

That leaves ARCHIE as the sole remaining rebooted ACP floppy comic, unless you're counting the Archie Horror titles (which barely manage to ship a new issue every 6 months or so).

Sales figures from comic shops serviced by Diamond Comics (which is all of them) for May 2017:

ARCHIE #20 = 10,755 copies
RIVERDALE #2 = 7,878 copies
THE ARCHIES (one-shot) = 7,741 copies
JUGHEAD #15 = 5,805 copies
JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS #7 = 5,254 copies
REGGIE AND ME #5 = 3,859 copies

If these titles, collectively, represent what Archie Comics as a publisher is depending on for its profitability and survival, they are indeed in big, big trouble. We already know that the last three listed titles have been cancelled, so we have some idea where the dividing line of unprofitability lies. There would seem to be no reason to follow up that ARCHIES one-shot based on sales, and if sales don't improve on RIVERDALE within a few issues, it seems likely that that one would be headed for cancellation as well, leaving only ARCHIE... but for how much longer?

The digests, on the other hand, are mainly distributed outside of Diamond Comics' direct-to-comics shop sales system, so we really have no reliable figures on their sales. You better HOPE they're selling better than those sales figures above, or it's just about all over for ACP, at least as far as print comics are concerned.

Now, what do those sales numbers mean, in relative terms, compared to the rest of the comic book publishing industry? The number of copies needed to be sold to be a good-selling comic book have changed over time, but in 2016, those numbers averaged out something like this: In 2016, the 50th best-selling comic book title sold a little less than 45,000 copies, the 100th best-selling comic book title sold a little less than 25,000 copies, the 150th best-selling comic book title sold a little less than 15,000 copies, the 200th best-selling comic book title sold a little less than 10,000 copies, and the 300th best-selling comic book title sold a little less than 5,000 copies. Above 50th place the number of copies sold and the actual titles are very volatile from year to year, due to special events and promotions.

Between the 50th and the 200th best-selling comic book gives you the best idea of what a reasonably good-selling (but not a "hit series" selling) comic book might sell -- the mid-range sellers that account for the bulk of all comic book titles that continue to be published. Below 200th place is where a publisher (depending on the publisher's overall rank within the market) would probably be looking to replace that title with another one that would sell better. Titles whose sales drop into the 300th best-selling range are almost certainly destined for cancellation by any but the smallest of comic book publishers.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on July 08, 2017, 10:52:33 PM
Really?  $6.99 for 128 pages?  Good luck with that Archie Comics.

And yet Archie Comics still manages to hoodwink people into spending $3.99 for a comic book with 20 pages of story (that's 20 cents a page, in case nobody's doing the math). Or $7.98 for 40 pages of story in 2 issues of the same comic book. Go figure!

Even a regular ("Double") digest issue has 164 pages, out of which about 16-18 are advertising. Let's assume that a 128-page digest also has 16 pages of ads. That leaves 112 pages of story. If you paid $6.99 for those 112 pages of story, then you paid approximately 6.25 cents for each page of story. But let's be generous and say that another 12 pages of those digests are made up of "superfluous" 1-page puzzle pages, single or half-page gags, or pinups, so they don't count as "stories". That still works out to only about 7 cents per page, my friend.

I guess it's up to the individual Archie Comics reader to determine whether or not they're really getting three times the entertainment value from every page of a new ACP floppy comic, as compared to the classic-style Archie stories in the digests. For me, I figure that if at least 40 pages of that ARCHIE AND ME COMICS DIGEST contain stories that I hadn't read and enjoyed reading, then I came out ahead financially by almost $1, rather than spending my money on 2 issues of an ACP floppy comic. Of course, the math changes a little if you're getting your comics at some kind of discount off cover price, and it seems likely that I may subscribe to the new digest, which would make the price per page of those digest stories significantly cheaper.

Just so you know. Classic Archie (the character) has not been replaced. He's still around, and appearing in stories every month. Those stories don't happen to appear in a floppy format comic book with the one-word title ARCHIE, though. They only appear in the digests.

If "main title" just means the title you like the best or think is the most important, well I can't argue with that. That's your opinion.

If it actually means anything objective though, the "main title" for a comic book publishing company should probably be the one they publish that sells the most copies (and/or generates the most profit, based on cover price). That would be - probably, since I can't confirm actual numbers - either Archie Comics Double Digest or World of Archie Double Digest. That applies regardless of the fact that the new stories in those titles are only 5 pages long.

Counting the two B&V digests, there are six digest titles, 3 of which are published 10 times a year, and 3 of which are published 6 times a year, and every one of them has a new 5-page story in it "in the traditional Archie style". So 48 new digest stories are published per year (240 pages in total). Archie (the classic version of the character) probably appears (conservatively) in about 2/3rds of those stories, so about 160 of those pages. With the end of Reggie's, Josie's, and Jughead's New Riverdale version floppy comics, I doubt if the remaining New Riverdale ARCHIE title can even claim to publish more than 160 pages of new material per year. Even if it does, it isn't read by as many people (some of whom aren't adults, so do they not count?) as the digests.