I've never liked Jughead. I found him rather one-note and annoying.
You forgot the five-issue Senior Year that came after Vixens.
You're making an assumption based on very little evidence (considering we have absolutely no sales data regarding digests).
According to Brian Hibbs' Bookscan column about comic sales in the bookstore market (including Amazon) in 2022, the biggest-selling Archie book in 2022 was 80 Years of Christmas, which sold a whopping 1,500 copies in the entire year. Obviously, this doesn't include digital comics, orders directly from Archie Comics, comic shop sales, etc. Still, that's pathetic.
Back in 2012 (the last year that we have circulation figures for the digests), the average sales for each title were:
Betty and Veronica Double Digest: 47600
Archie Double Digest: 45641
World of Archie Double Digest: 39936
Archie and Friends Double Digest: 38855
B&V Friends Double Digest: 38278
Jughead Double Digest: 37812
Archie: 15292
Betty and Veronica: 9095
Kevin Keller: 7274
Fast forward to 2023. All of the floppies are gone. Not only has Jughead lost his only digest title, but Archie has lost one as well. We have no idea whose digests are selling more nor, more importantly, at what level. No one is releasing sales figures. Not publishers, not distributors, not stores. Even the direct market has lacked all sales figures since the last ones were released for April of 2022. The general public is in the dark about the sales of the entire comics industry - except for what's revealed in Hibbs' Bookscan article (in which Archie Comics doesn't even garner a mention; I had to ask him for info).
What it reveals:
1) Manga rules.
2) Among Western comics, Dav Pilkey and his Dogman franchse rules.
3) You have to go far down the chart before you come to a Western title that's aimed at adults (and it's not from DC or Marvel).
4) DC sells better than Marvel.
5) Nearly every publisher that licenses and adapts Marvel characters sells better than Marvel.
6) Marvel managed to place only one book in the Top 750.
7) The comics business is hit-driven. 10% of all sales come from around two-dozen books.
So, in the comics market as a whole, kids' stuff rules. That's very different than the direct market, which caters to aging, superhero-gobbling fanboys.
And yet Archie Comics' trades sell horribly. Let's be super, super generous and say each trade copy of 80 Years of Christmas sold for $20 (yeah, an obvious overestimation, but it'll balance out a bit under the assumption that Archie Comics sold other trade collections last year, however few). That's $30,000 gross income for the year from the North American bookstore market. They couldn't afford to keep the lights on with that money. So the digests must be selling well enough for Archie Comics to survive, right?
Well, these days, with the price of digests being so high (and with the new stories being available to read for free), I find it hard to believe they would be selling anywhere near 2012 levels.
But let's say they are. Let's say the four remaining digests haven't dipped below 2012 sales levels in the ten years since. Again, it's an overestimation, but there are also two additional, more sporadic digest titles that I'm not accounting for. If each of these four digests published ten issues per year and sold at full retail price, Archie Comics is looking at, at best, $17,128,354.50 in gross annual income from the digests. There's no way that they're pulling in that much money. If they were, they could afford to publish much more than the sporadic reprint floppies and occasional horror one-shots. There hasn't been a new licensed novel since 2020, and there hasn't been an OGN since 2021. There has been zero expansion of the brand.
Riverdale, long since a punching bag, still in the beginning of its highly divisive final season, managed to pull in 220,000 live viewers for its latest episode, not much less than the entirety of the digest line did in monthly sales back in 2012 (and almost certainly more than the digests are selling monthly now).
Didn't Fernando say in another thread that Jughead's titles were selling the worst back when he was at the company, despite claims that he was people's favorite character?
Well, here's some trivia for you that bears this out a little. In the direct market only, with a handful of exceptions between the floppy and digest, Cheryl Blossom routinely outsold Jughead's titles during the entirety of its run. No idea if this was true for all sales across all channels, but there ya go.
I do see Archie Comics chart in some specific sales categories on Amazon. Mostly romance comics and licensed teen TV and movie comics. Mostly it's the digests, but sometimes a floppy will chart. It doesn't take much sales to chart in a specific sales category on Amazon, though, since those charts are updated hourly, I think.
Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2023, 02:12:32 PMBut there hasn't been a regular B&V title (unless you count those quarterly one-shots that are 75% reprint) since 2015 when their classic ongoing title ended. Only two miniseries, VIXENS and the Adam Hughes one, while ARCHIE had an ongoing title that ran for 47 issues, plus a number of miniseries. JUGHEAD's ongoing title at least managed 16 issues -- while what would presumably have been the start of an ongoing "New Riverdale" series (Adam Hughes') for B&V managed a mere 3 issues (released over a span of one-and-a-half years!)
You forgot the five-issue Senior Year that came after Vixens.
Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2023, 02:12:32 PMHave you not kept track of what titles ACP has released as trade paperbacks? True enough that JUGHEAD comes in dead last of the Big Three with a bare few, but B&V trail, far, far, far behind the numerous trade collections released for ARCHIE.
That should debunk the theory that B&V is still ACP's biggest cash cow. It hasn't been for at least 10-15 years now.
You're making an assumption based on very little evidence (considering we have absolutely no sales data regarding digests).
According to Brian Hibbs' Bookscan column about comic sales in the bookstore market (including Amazon) in 2022, the biggest-selling Archie book in 2022 was 80 Years of Christmas, which sold a whopping 1,500 copies in the entire year. Obviously, this doesn't include digital comics, orders directly from Archie Comics, comic shop sales, etc. Still, that's pathetic.
Back in 2012 (the last year that we have circulation figures for the digests), the average sales for each title were:
Betty and Veronica Double Digest: 47600
Archie Double Digest: 45641
World of Archie Double Digest: 39936
Archie and Friends Double Digest: 38855
B&V Friends Double Digest: 38278
Jughead Double Digest: 37812
Archie: 15292
Betty and Veronica: 9095
Kevin Keller: 7274
Fast forward to 2023. All of the floppies are gone. Not only has Jughead lost his only digest title, but Archie has lost one as well. We have no idea whose digests are selling more nor, more importantly, at what level. No one is releasing sales figures. Not publishers, not distributors, not stores. Even the direct market has lacked all sales figures since the last ones were released for April of 2022. The general public is in the dark about the sales of the entire comics industry - except for what's revealed in Hibbs' Bookscan article (in which Archie Comics doesn't even garner a mention; I had to ask him for info).
What it reveals:
1) Manga rules.
2) Among Western comics, Dav Pilkey and his Dogman franchse rules.
3) You have to go far down the chart before you come to a Western title that's aimed at adults (and it's not from DC or Marvel).
4) DC sells better than Marvel.
5) Nearly every publisher that licenses and adapts Marvel characters sells better than Marvel.
6) Marvel managed to place only one book in the Top 750.
7) The comics business is hit-driven. 10% of all sales come from around two-dozen books.
So, in the comics market as a whole, kids' stuff rules. That's very different than the direct market, which caters to aging, superhero-gobbling fanboys.
And yet Archie Comics' trades sell horribly. Let's be super, super generous and say each trade copy of 80 Years of Christmas sold for $20 (yeah, an obvious overestimation, but it'll balance out a bit under the assumption that Archie Comics sold other trade collections last year, however few). That's $30,000 gross income for the year from the North American bookstore market. They couldn't afford to keep the lights on with that money. So the digests must be selling well enough for Archie Comics to survive, right?
Well, these days, with the price of digests being so high (and with the new stories being available to read for free), I find it hard to believe they would be selling anywhere near 2012 levels.
But let's say they are. Let's say the four remaining digests haven't dipped below 2012 sales levels in the ten years since. Again, it's an overestimation, but there are also two additional, more sporadic digest titles that I'm not accounting for. If each of these four digests published ten issues per year and sold at full retail price, Archie Comics is looking at, at best, $17,128,354.50 in gross annual income from the digests. There's no way that they're pulling in that much money. If they were, they could afford to publish much more than the sporadic reprint floppies and occasional horror one-shots. There hasn't been a new licensed novel since 2020, and there hasn't been an OGN since 2021. There has been zero expansion of the brand.
Riverdale, long since a punching bag, still in the beginning of its highly divisive final season, managed to pull in 220,000 live viewers for its latest episode, not much less than the entirety of the digest line did in monthly sales back in 2012 (and almost certainly more than the digests are selling monthly now).
Didn't Fernando say in another thread that Jughead's titles were selling the worst back when he was at the company, despite claims that he was people's favorite character?
Well, here's some trivia for you that bears this out a little. In the direct market only, with a handful of exceptions between the floppy and digest, Cheryl Blossom routinely outsold Jughead's titles during the entirety of its run. No idea if this was true for all sales across all channels, but there ya go.
I do see Archie Comics chart in some specific sales categories on Amazon. Mostly romance comics and licensed teen TV and movie comics. Mostly it's the digests, but sometimes a floppy will chart. It doesn't take much sales to chart in a specific sales category on Amazon, though, since those charts are updated hourly, I think.