This week, I review the first issue of the new "Betty & Veronica" miniseries.

I don't know what it is about digital comics, but if there's a print comic and a digital comic of the same thing at the same price I'll go for the print comic every single time. They're just a lot more convenient to read (although they do take up a lot more space). That said, I'm always on the lookout for digital comics that can't be had (at least not easily or cheaply) in print. Loosely translated, what that mostly means for me is OLD comics; comics that are now public domain that someone scanned and uploaded to sites like Digital Comic Museum or ComicBookPlus, or fan-translated scans (scanslations) of Japanese manga which the regular American print publishers have chosen NOT to translate. Or webcomics that can be saved by right-clicking the images. AND of course, what all those things have in common is that they're FREE. I might feel differently about 'regular' digital comics if they were cheaper, like maybe $1 for a 20-page story. I mean, I can see why print comics cost $4 for a single floppy. They're printed on decent paper, but they don't print a hell of a lot of them, so I can see where the money's going. Most people only think about what the writers, artists, editors, production people and the publisher need to charge to make a living... but with print comics, a large part of that $4 cover price is keeping a printer, a distributor, and a retailer in business. What's digital's excuse? It literally costs NOTHING to make as many copies as they can sell. There are NO material costs beyond the cost of initial production, no paper, ink, shipping costs, etc. Maybe they'd sell more if they weren't so profit-greedy. Yet at the same time, if they make them TOO cheap, then they're stabbing the print end of their publishing operation right through the heart. I say digital comics won't really be practical until they don't compete directly with print comics, nor do I want to contribute to the death of print comics, so I guess it's print for me, as long as it still exists.

I was paying a lot in shipping for physical comics, because there are no physical comic shops near me and haven't been in years (the only one that comes up in a search is 18 miles away, in the next county). So I quit physical comics in December of 2016, switched to digital, and haven't looked back.
As for the price of digital comics, well, I think $3.99 is a bit too much, regardless of whether it's digital or physical. But does anyone know how much that Archie pays the writers, artists, and letterers per issue? The $3.99 price might make some sense in terms of a way to recoup costs.
For me, it's always more convenient to read something digitally, because I'm constantly parked in front of my computer until my mom goes to bed, so it's just a matter of opening it up in my Kindle for PC program.

You might be the odd man out on this opinion. I always assumed people wanted MORE episodes of series that they liked, not less. It may just be that you have a heavy schedule with too much TV viewing on your plate.

That's not really the reason. Well, it's part of it. It's more like I have so little free time that I have a backlog of DVDs and Blu-rays to watch - and anything interesting that I find on Netflix on top of that. I have a job, and I live with my 78-year-old mom, who deals with constant pain (and constantly makes me aware of it) and is rather dumb when it comes to technology - and who also feels I have to take up the rather pointless tasks of doing yard work now that she she no longer can (the only times that I even go outside are to check the mail, so I really don't see the point, but that's unacceptable to her). Plus, she generally parks herself on the living room couch all day and either Skypes with relatives, plays sound-effect-laden computer games, or watches her endless supply of cop shows, leaving me only about a couple hours in the evening to get any kind of viewing in.

Also, I read an article a few months ago that said the trend for millennials and younger is to watch content usually not much longer than 20 minutes in length (often, this is content created by their peers and shared on YouTube), so a 22-episode (or more) season of 40-minute episodes is too much by comparison. (Heck, I myself take a few days to watch one movie.)

Also, I recently got into a discussion on the Supergirl TV Reddit, and the feeling is a 22-episode season is too much, and it's made even worse by constantly going on hiatus, which makes people forget plot details and even entire characters (I watch reaction videos, and the reactors are often confused for a while as to who certain people are supposed to be). I had suggested either a shorter season or multiple mini-story arcs per season (or even - gasp! - stand-alone episodes that have nothing to do with anything else), but the response that I got was this would come off as a foreign concept to the network.
Heck, the reason that Riverdale's ratings went up from season 1 to season 2 is due to new, younger viewers discovering the series on Netflix (it went up the week after the season finale, I believe) and binge-watching it.
Personally, it took me two years to "binge-watch" the entire Star Trek franchise and a few months to do "Charmed". Between my weekly blog, fanfics, watching YouTube videos, and trying to get some original novels done, I simply can't spare an entire day to watch an entire season of a series.

For New Year's Eve, I review "Kiss of the Century" from Cheryl Blossom, No. 28.

Y'know, when you use terminology like "Season 5, episode 09", it's meaningless to the rest of us in real-world numbers. Different TV shows produced in different years by different companies had a different number of episodes comprising a "Season", so unless you give us the episode's aggregate number, you're not really telling us anything in terms of milestones. And even then, shouldn't a TV series with hour-long episodes be given twice the credit for each episode as a series which only had 1/2-hour episodes? I mean, theoretically, you could split any hour-long episode into two shorter "continued" chunks. So if Riverdale has hour-long episodes, it seems in terms of running time, it should approximately equal TWO half-hour episodes of a show like Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch (either the original Filmation cartoon OR the later Melissa Joan Hart live-action series). I mean, what you're counting here isn't the number of discrete "stories". If the live-action Sabrina series had a two-part continued episode comprised of two half-hour shows, you're not counting THAT as "one episode", right? And neither are you counting a Filmation half-hour Sabrina cartoon which was comprised of two (or even three) distinct story segments as more than ONE episode, am I right? So (ignoring the variation in allotted time for commercials) what you really SHOULD be counting as a yardstick gauge is half-hour programming blocks.

That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm counting one Riverdale episode as equal to two episodes of pretty much anything else.
To date, Riverdale has amassed:
43 one-hour episodes (so 86 half-hour blocks)
13 tie-in comics (one of which is double-length, so let's say 14 half-hour blocks)a Student Handbook (equal to about 4 half-hour blocks)a prequel novel (equal to about 12 half-hour blocks)
So let's say Riverdale has about 126 half-hour blocks.
So Riverdale (show+tie-ins) has surpassed the continuities of:
Riverdale High (12 prose novels of approximately 115 pages each plus a double-length Summer Special)
The New Archies (13 half-hour episodes plus tie-in comics)
Archie's Weird Mysteries (40 episodes + 1 movie (4 episodes) + 34 tie-in comics)
In the animated Sabrina continuity, Riverdale has surpassed all 65 episodes of The Animated Series, all 39 tie-in comics (all 37 Sabrina episodes plus the issues directly preceding and following it), the Friends Forever movie (equal to about 4 episodes), and the first 9 (of 26) episodes of Sabrina's Secret Life.
With Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale (just the show) has surpassed the first 78 (of 163) episodes and the two TV movies (about 4 episodes each). If you take the tie-in novels into account, Sabrina basically reigns supreme and will never be touched.

And no, I don't agree that spinoff series are "all part of the same show" in some larger sense. On the one hand, you can make the self-evident statement that content-wise, there's no distinction to be made between episodes of The Archie Show and Archie's TV Funhouse (and indeed, episodes of the former were aired as re-runs on episodes of the latter). But then you yourself reject Archie's TV Funnies as not fitting that logic,

Actually, no. I did state I'm counting Archie's T.V. Funnies, even though they contain very little Archie content.

and we can get into sticky determinations like "Does Sabrina (the animated series) count as a spinoff of the live-action Melissa Joan Hart series?"

It isn't.

On the one hand, one can definitely point to a causal relationship where if the latter had not existed first, then the former would not have existed either,

Well, by using that line of reasoning, you could argue Archie's Weird Mysteries (which debuted in the same season as Sabrina: The Animated Series) owes its existence to the MJH series as well. And that both cartoons, being produced by DiC, also owe their existences to DiC's previous Archie productions, The New Archies and To Riverdale and Back Again. And that they all ultimately owe their existences to the comics, so they're all spin-offs in a sense.
But this is about continuities/universes.

but... it's just makes things messy, because using that line of reasoning, you can argue that the Filmation Sabrina counts as part of the Filmation Archie.

It does. Sabrina first debuted in the TV special, Archie and His New Pals. And her own segments (prior to being repackaged as her own show), first aired in The Archie Comedy Hour, in which she attended Riverdale High and regularly interacted with the gang (although not always). This is why I count both Riverdale and ChAoS against the combined Archie+Sabrina Filmation continuity (but see below for how Riverdale fares against it without ChAoS).

Or that Angel is in fact, essentially the same show as Buffy, with a slightly different focus. I don't buy it. In terms of popularity/longevity, each show more or less stands or falls on its own by the merits of its specific content, although the distinction of exact title (which involved some variation on the word "Archie" from one season to the next) was fairly blurry during the late-1960s/early-1970s, due to conditions mostly endemic to Saturday morning animation programming content, with the Filmation cycle. If you insist on counting them all as part of the same thing, you need to include not only ALL versions of Filmation's Archie, but anything remotely connected (that includes TV Funnies, Sabrina AND the Groovie Goolies). Unless you can point to an incarnation of new episodes of the Goolies which aired as its own distinct show in which Sabrina never appeared as a character, I don't think it's fair to disinclude those.

The GG did, in fact, have their own Sabrina-less spin-off:

The show originally aired on CBS as Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies, and also featured Archie Comics character Sabrina the Teenage Witch with her aunts Hilda and Zelda. Sabrina had had previous appearances as a supporting character on The Archie Comedy Hour the previous year. In 1971, Sabrina was spun off into her own show. Never a critical success, the Goolies had appeal, reappearing in 1971 as The Groovie Goolies on their own solo show. After one season with Sabrina, executives decided that the Goolies were strong enough to make it on their own, and thus Sabrina and the Goolies both received their own separate shows.

So, regarding the battle against the Filmation continuity, I have determined Riverdale (with all of its tie-in material) has reached episode 6 (of 13) of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour, meaning it will tie Filmation in 7 more episodes. Without the tie-in material, Riverdale has reached episode 14 (of 16) of Archie's T.V. Funnies and will reach episode 5 (of 16) of The New Archie and Sabrina Hour by the end of this season. If renewed for another season, Riverdale (without the tie-in material) will tie Filmation continuity with episode 8.
All of this is assuming, of course, Filmation continued to produce new musical segments well into its run and wasn't just recycling large amounts of material.

For Christmas, I review "Holi-Daze" from Cheryl Blossom, No. 28.

I review "Here We Come A Caroling!" from Cheryl Blossom, No. 19.