Wow, how many episodes so far? And they killed one (who?) already, with another one due at any time now?
So, sort of like reverse family-planning or something?  I like this trend. 2 in one season. So carry the one, hiatus, summer season...
I like the way the way the numbers are adding up on this trend!   

He's had it (jacket or sweater, doesn't matter) sometime in the 2000s, or even the 2010s, hasn't he?  I could have sworn, somewhere. Of course it's not consistent or anything, it's just a whenever-type thing, right?

I would say it was about the best Little Archie comic I ever read. It's more of a thing like where I'm just into all those Franco & Baltazar comics: Itty Bitty Hellboy, Tiny Titans, Super Powers, Super Pets, Aw Yeah!, Action Cat, whatever.

A.B.C. WARRIORS: RETURN TO EARTH HC
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ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE SPRING ANNUAL #26
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Performed a public service by alerting the System Administrator to a serious breach of netiquette. 

The vulgar thread in question was deleted as in poor taste, and offending parties were dealt with as Oldiesmann deemed appropriate.

A just and equitable resolution to a shameful episode of misbehavior.

Let's go back to having fun now.

Forum rules refresher course:

1. Anyone can post (if they feel like it).

2. Anyone can choose not to post.

3. Anyone can read the posts they feel like reading, and ignore the ones they don't.

4. Anyone can reply (if they feel like it).

5. Anyone can choose not to reply.

6. If someone's posts contain rude comments and you'd rather not read them, you can go to your profile page and add that member's name to the "ignore" list.

7. No one owns anything here. It's a public forum.

8. The world does not revolve around "Alexandra Cabot", regardless of what she may think, or what advertising slogans she buys in the store saying that she's "better than you".

9. Tantrums will be ignored.

10. Time & energy are finite commodities,  so don't waste them doing anything you don't really want to do, like dealing with obsessives who just can't get over themselves. Wouldn't you rather be doing something fun? Of course you would -- but be careful not to confuse that with enabling someone else's sick sense of fun. Life's too short.

11. If you really don't know what you're getting into, don't mess with it. Just leave it alone.
    11a.  If your own house is made out of glass, it's not nice to throw rocks.
    11b.  If given a choice beween passive and agressive, stick with passive.

12.  Archie Comics are COMICAL comics!

I'm missing some, but I'll take a stab at about 80% of them (this is without looking at LWA):

ON THE LEFT of Lawyer
Front Row:  2 more lawyers (?? - not sure if they were more than incidental characters)
Row 2:  Ginger Lopez, Frankie Valdez, Shrill, Mr. Weatherbee
Row 3:  Evelyn Evernever(?), Pop Tate, Svenson, Mrs. Beazly, Ms. Grundy, Prof. Flutesnoot
Row 4:  Shary the spy girl, Coach Kleats, Chunk, "girl with the mole" (traditional find-it BG character for Fernando Ruiz)
Row 5:  Midge Klump, Bingo Wilkin, Alexander Cabot III, Bippy the Hippie (or possibly, the JOSIE version of Clyde Diddit), Fernando Ruiz


ON THE RIGHT of Lawyer
Front Row: Veronica Lodge & Marcy McDermott
Row 2:  Archie, Mr. & Mrs. Lodge, Smithers
Row 3:  (? - bald man w/glasses), Jason & Cheryl Blossom, Gaston (Lodge family chef)
Row 4:  (? - blonde girl w/glasses), Josie(?) partly obscured by Mr. Lodge's head, (? - brown-haired freckled girl), Chuck Clayton, Nancy Woods

NOTE:  Hair color is kind of important in trying to identify a character in a crowd scene from a single image, so if the colorist was off on matching any of the more obscure characters' hair colors to the way it normally appeared in their earlier appearances in Archie Comics, then I probably mis-identified that character.

Not entirely sure on who the lawyer in the center is, but I'll take a guess. It's either Robert Ingersoll (legal columnist for The Comics Buyer's Guide) or Batton Lash.

Love that one!

Quote from: Alexandra Cabot on April 05, 2017, 08:18:58 PM
Second time you're ignoring me in my own thread, I guess because I proved your pretentious blathering wrong with my counter points.      Don't worry, maybe someday you'll type a paragraph so long on this forum that you'll be correct just from the sheer word count.  I can't guarantee anyone will actually read it though (like they don't now).

It's pretty simple. My comments were in reply to irishmoxie and Mr. Lodge. I could respond to your comments if I felt like it, but I don't feel like it's worth my time. Statements like the above prove my point. You're spoiling for a fight. Sorry, not interested. Since my "blathering" (which I might point out no one's forcing you to read -- it's funny you don't take your own advice) annoys you, I thought I'd accommodate you by sparing you the reply. Is that short enough and to the point for you? Nice work there -- you damn me for posting replies and not posting replies in the same breath. Not that it matters as long as you can damn me for something, right? Y'know, it's just a crazy idea, but you could try behaving like an adult.

FALL AND RISE OF CAPTAIN ATOM #4 (of 6)
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LITTLE ARCHIE #1 (one-shot)
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MIGHTY MAN #1 (one-shot?)
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DOC SAVAGE: RING OF FIRE #1 (of 4)
RO-BUSTERS: THE COMPLETE NUTS & BOLTS VOL. 2 HC
A.B.C. WARRIORS: RETURN TO RO-BUSTERS HC

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on April 05, 2017, 07:09:31 AM
Another really fun issue that wraps up Ryan North's tenure on the Jughead book. 

This issue is probably the highwater mark for this title. Definitely the funniest issue so far, but having said that, this is about as far away as you can get from the traditional style of Archie comedy, which although it sometimes leans a little in the satirical direction, is never quite as temporal in its humor. What I mean is that the humor here will be impenetrable to anyone 20 years from now who wasn't old enough to understand it in 2017. It's really quite funny, at least to anyone with more than a median awareness of online culture and social media. I also felt the running subtext commentary worked better in this issue (it didn't distract or slow things down) than in any of the previous ones.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on April 05, 2017, 07:09:31 AMI'm very skeptical I'll like Mark Waid and Ian Flynn's version of Jughead as much as Ryan North's.  I'll give it a chance but Ryan's writing on Jughead has been the highlight of the Archie reboots for me.   

I agree. And while I enjoyed Ian Flynn's writing on MEGA MAN and NEW CRUSADERS, those were adventure-style comics, as is most of Mark Waid's writing that I enjoy (I'm just really, really underwhelmed by ARCHIE, and Waid's not generally known for his humor or realism).

Quote from: Mr.Lodge on April 03, 2017, 02:44:31 PM
If all publishers care about is money, how many issues at what price should an issue sell to make doing it worthwhile? Is there such a thing as a 'loss leader' in comics to suit an agenda or cater to a niche?

Sure there are. They are temporary things, because you can't just bleed money forever.

FCBD comic = loss leader.  $1/50c/25c comics = loss leaders. These are all comics published which have "negative profit" in the most direct sense. They hope to entice new readers, and the profit will come later.

There are other titles which larger publishers can afford to publish near break-even profit margins only for reasons of trying to bring in new readers (DC and Marvel kids' titles, for example) or something like Vertigo titles where the single issues don't make much money, but that will be offset later by sales of trade collections. Larger publishers can afford to carry a few titles with short-term losses if the strategy helps achieve some longer-term goals, only because they publish so many titles. Ultimately though, this strategy of 'seeding' can only be maintained if there's a perception that the publisher is accomplishing something in the longer term -- otherwise, it's perceived as flushing money down the toilet.

Some further thoughts related to the comic book marketplace, the audience, or potential audience, for comics as a medium in general, and the diversity of that audience occur to me. These are very basic assumptions that readers of comics never seem to consider or question. Why is the audience of comic book consumers less diverse than the audience of consumers for movies, television, video games, or novels? The comic book industry is dependent on motivated readers. People who have decided for whatever reason that "I WANT to read comics." Reading comics is no longer a casual experience as it once was many decades ago when it could still be called a mass medium. It can't be strictly about the limits of content that the current comic market is offering. That doesn't explain why millions of people would spend their disposable entertainment budget money on seeing a Batman movie or playing a Batman video game, but less than 1% of those same people are willing to spend $3 or $4 for fifteen or twenty minutes worth of entertainment reading a Batman comic book. How does someone go from never having ever read a comic book to one day reading a comic book, and then reading more comic books, until it becomes a desire and then a habit? What makes someone decide that the money spent on a comic is a good return on their entertainment dollar, and therefore worthwhile? There are social factors as well those related to an individual's personal life history, and I would submit those factors are one of the biggest things limiting the diversity of the comics audience. A long time ago almost every kid in America was likely to have read some kind of comic at some time in his or her childhood, but that hasn't been the case for years. If they're not familiarized with the medium at a young age, a person is less likely to ever acquire the habit. Just a few of the things rambling through my mind here.

Quote from: irishmoxie on April 02, 2017, 09:38:05 AM
The reason Marvel isn't successful with race and sex changing is because they keep the same old storylines (targeted at male readers) but have a female protagonist and sometimes cute art which attracts the female readers. It's incongruous. If they want to attract women to read their comics they need more slice of life, humor, romance, and school life.

It's an interesting theory, to which the counter-argument would be "show me the money". I take your point that it's not possible for consumers to purchase a comic book which doesn't exist, but if we posit the existence of such a comic book as you describe, that doesn't prove the actual existence of a consumer base large enough to support it. This is where you need to prove the theoretical audience is an actual audience. I'm not doubting the existence of girls who like the kind of things you describe, only the intersection of the set of those girls with a large enough set of consumers willing to spend money to follow a comic book series. Clearly such a market used to exist at one time (the existence of all those back issues of romance comics certainly proves it), but what comics have they been reading since they stopped publishing romance comic books?

An example would certainly be helpful, so if you can point at a specific successful comic book which fits your description that has a stable consumer base and an established history of publication, then you've proved the existence of the actual audience. It's harder for me to accept the premise that a potential audience of non-comic book consumers spontaneously turns into an actual audience of comic book consumers if the product merely exists. No disrespect intended -- maybe I'm just not looking in the right direction. Love & Rockets ? Maybe, but I'm not sure as far as how the audience demographics break down on that particular title.

I guess the thing that's most puzzling to me about what you just wrote is that the classic type of Archie comic book (unless I'm misreading you) seems to fit your description, yet that consumer base seems to have been slowly evaporating over the last three or four decades. Or somehow the format or distribution is not connecting with the potential audience wanting that type of comic. But I can certainly empathize with the general feeling here of "Why aren't there more comics of the kind _I_ like being published (i.e. "good" comics)? As individual readers, we feel stymied by the economic realities of what is popular (and what isn't) in the marketplace as it exists now, because it limits the number and type of comics that we'd like to be able to buy.

I mean, there's a theoretical diversity of the potential audience that comprises the marketplace, and then there's the actual audience that comprises the marketplace, which doesn't seem as diverse in point of fact, at least to me. Comic book publishers just want to make money. They don't care whose money they're taking, whether the consumer is male, female, gay, straight, or a member of some ethnic minority. It doesn't matter WHOSE money they get, as long as they get it, so it's to their advantage to try to exploit every niche market they can. The natural laws of economics would dictate that to the degree that there is some diversity of the potential consumers, those consumers should fill a void if it exists.

Interesting. I don't follow the connection, but if watching Rick & Morty makes you want to upload more Archie Comics stories, so be it!

I can't even imagine what a thread about Rick & Morty's "character ethics" would be like...