Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 21, 2017, 07:04:58 AM

I think I saw FR had a print made of that cover illustration to sell, and it doesn't surprise me that would be one of his most popular covers and prints. It seems to be pretty well-recognized among Archie fans.

I certainly did, DecarloRules.


Not only is it a popular print, but it also stops a lot of traffic at conventions!


By the way, everyone can check out my prints over at my website:


http://fernandoruizeverybody.com/comic-prints-for-sale-purchase/




That's the place to go to find out about my latest projects and appearances. I will even talk about Archie still whenever it comes up over there.

Quote from: SAGG on April 17, 2017, 06:41:51 PM
Thank you for responding. have you heard from Mr. Parent that this extra book will cut into his Die Kitty Die work?

Dan and I are pretty committed to Kitty. We've got lots of plans we're working on. So far, regardless of what else we've been doing, we've always made Kitty our top priority! It hasn't been easy but so far we've been managing it!

Quote from: Mr.Lodge on April 17, 2017, 03:12:28 PM
Don't care for Dan Parent. Too pedestrian/generic for me.

More a fan of Goldberg, Ruiz, DeCarlo, Crane, Legace, Hartley, Montana.

Thanks, Mr. Lodge.


I happen to like what Dan is doing here, but I do wish the company would have the guts to let him just go full CLASSIC!

It's definitely a step in the right direction. It's too bad its a half of a step. Once again, we see Archie Comics trying to have their cake and eat it too. What a way of sub-dividing their brand! How many different Archies are we going to have? Reboot Archie, Classic Archie, New Classic Archie... Which of these is going to be the face of the company?

Quote from: SAGG on April 17, 2017, 01:50:39 PM
I just wished they could do the same thing with the other Classic Archie artists, like Mr. Ruiz, Mr. Shultz, Ms. Legace, and Mr. Kennedy....

With Dan busy on this book, and presumably subsequent follow-ups, I'm sure you'll see some of these others coming back to pick up the slack on digests here and there. Given the really poor treatment Archie Comics has shown me, I will not be among them.

I understand they've started writing Season 2. They better hurry! There's a writers' striking looming that could potentially delay production and consequently the premiere of the second season.


As recent weeks have shown, this show doesn't do well after an absence. Whatever momentum it has could be derailed forever.

Riverdale drops another tenth as it dips down to 0.87 million viewers for the first time. Its the second week in a row the audience shrinks by a tenth.


http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/daily-ratings/tv-ratings-thursday-april-13-2017/

A few thoughts on Riverdale...


1. The show appears to hover around a million live viewers each week. The premiere drew an audience of just above a million viewers with something like 1.3 million viewers. It hasn't reached that number again. This isn't a big audience but its just enough by the CW's low standards. As I've often said, the biggest break this show ever caught was when Fox passed it up. Had Fox scheduled it, the trigger-happy network surely would've cancelled it by now.


2. The last two weeks, the show failed to crack a million viewers with an audience of about 0.9 million. This was after a hiatus of about two or three weeks. Did this hiatus trip up the show's momentum? Was the audience so minimally invested in the show that they haven't bothered to return after the hiatus?


3. The show seems to do well on Netflix and with dvr viewers.


4. What will the show mean for the comics? Will the show draw new readers to the books? Right now it doesn't appear that this is happening. All of Archie's titles appear to be shedding readers every month with titles like Josie, Reggie & Me and even Jughead plummeting to dangerous thresholds.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 31, 2017, 02:29:07 AM

Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on March 28, 2017, 08:33:52 PM
Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

No lie -- that's exactly what passed through my mind when I first laid eyes on the solicitation!

I haven't followed The Black Hood's sales TOO closely, but from what I remember seeing each issue of this "Season Two" or whatever they're calling this latest batch of issues seem to sell around two thousand copies. On at least ONE of Diamond's list direct market sales figures, it was dead last. At 2K copies, this book is selling around where the pre-reboot Jughead title... previously Archie Comics' WORST selling book... was and this book is significantly more expensive to produce. It HAS to be losing money!


At a 3.99 cover price and selling two-thousand copies, this book is bringing in roughly 8000.00. Unless Archie Comics has negotiated a special deal, Diamond usually takes around half of that money leaving ACP with a paltry four grand! Consider printing costs and the creative team on this book and we're looking at a financial sinkhole! Just to give you an idea... I'm not sure how many actual story pages are in an issue of The Black Hood but let's say its the standard twenty pages of story and art. If they're paying the artist 100.00 per page to draw this thing... and for a book like this that would be pretty LOW... each issue of The Black Hood is costing two-thousand dollars just to get drawn! And we're not even considering the scripting, the lettering, or the colorist yet! In many circumstances that 2K wouldn't be a lot, but when the book is pulling in only 4K, you can see the problem.


The only hope and monkey wrench in all this is maybe this thing is selling phenomenally well digitally.

Wow! They STILL put out The Black Hood?!?

The numbers for February's direct sales figures are out. Here's how Archie is doing:


Archie #17 = 11K


This number held from the preceding issue but down from the 13K the title had been at a couple of months back. I've mentioned before that January is a notoriously bad month for publishing in general. I'd wondered if the dip in this title's sales was due to the usual January publishing doldrums or part of an overall gradual decline. I'm still not convinced one way or the other. Has "Reboot Fatigue" set in? How does this title refresh itself and attract new readers?


Jughead #13 = 6K


This number is also being held from the preceding issue. This book HAS to be in trouble. The pre-reboot Jughead sold about 1.5 K when it was cancelled. Keep in mind the current creative team is paid significantly more than the pre-reboot crew. This book is also currently bolstered by THREE variant covers (Another expense!) a month! Taking those factors into consideration, this book is probably drifting very close to where its predecessor was in terms of profitability. The preceding Jughead title was published by the previous regime of Archie Comics out of pride and stubbornness. They believed Archie Comics should ALWAYS publish a Jughead title. They also published the thirty-two page books even at a loss because they provided fresh material that would later be funneled into the far, far more profitable digests. From their perspective, the digests paid for the thirty-two's.


Josie #4 = 6.5 K


This one suffered a heavy drop of about 2K from the preceding issue. Ouch! Bad, bad news for a title in its fourth issue. I expect this one to be retroactively declared a "mini-series" soon... or go on "hiatus."


These were the only Archie titles I could find on February's sales charts. Wow!

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on March 06, 2017, 08:01:46 PM

I don't understand why ACP doesn't have old copies stored somewhere. I also don't get why they don't keep track of which artist worked on a certain story (I have seen a few times "artist unknown" on those 1000 page comics). Really? they don't have all of that info written down somewhere?

They really don't.


At best, they have some of their runs bound in these beautiful hardcover volumes but they really don't keep copies of every issue they print. Maybe they have more recent books but not the early stuff.


As for credits, early on artists were allowed to sign their work. In those days, an artist would be given a story and he would turn it around complete with the inking and the lettering done. The artist might hire anonymous assistants to do some of the lettering and inking for him. Later on as the production of comics evolved into the more familiar "assembly line" process we have today (and even today its sort of changing again thanks to the advent of computers and digital production!) the credits fell away from many comic book. Publishers, as DeCarlo Rules said, assumed their audience was comprised completely of children who simply did not care who was drawing Archie, Mickey Mouse, etc. 


A secondary cause for the elimination... and outright SUPPRESSION... of credits is believed to be that the publishers deliberately wanted to keep their artists anonymous and interchangeable so as to prevent the rise of any "superstar artists" who might ask for more money!


With the amount of stories Archie has published over the years and the number of pencillers and inkers they've had, they have no definitive catalogue of who definitely did what. In recent years, Archie has decided to add credits to their reprinted stories in the digests. A cynical reason for this was to camouflage the new stories, which were always credited, from the reprinted ones and hopefully no one would be able to tell how few new stories were actually being added to new digests. Up until my "departure," the credits for these reprints were added by the production staff and when a credit couldn't be found, the story would be shown to editor, Victor Gorelick, who would identify the artists from memory or if he absolutely couldn't remember, by analyzing the style. Obviously, it's not a perfect system. I know in recent years, I've been credited for writing a few stories that I only drew.

Sonic Universe sold a little over 4K in January.


http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2017/2017-01.html


In other Archie news...


Archie = 11K 


This is a pretty big drop of about 2K from the previous issue. This book, Archie's only remaining monthly title, was averaging a loss of about 1K copies per month. Then it appeared to level off at about 13K for a couple of months. January is traditionally a bad month for publishing. This drop may be the January doldrums or perhaps an indication that some serious hemorrhaging is about to happen.


Jughead = 6K


This title has also been losing about 1K per month. At 6K, there's not much room for this one to go much lower.

Reggie = 5K


Ouch! It's clear now why this one was retro-actively declared to be a mini-series. This one will limp to its death at #5. There's a weird gap of a few months until #3. That's only going to hurt things even more!


Keep in mind these numbers are the books ORDERED by retailers and NOT the actual books SOLD to readers. Nationally, 11K copies of January's Archie issue may have been ordered by stores but that isn't necessarily the number of copies the stores actually sold. This is one of the reasons you see these numbers go lower with each issue. These days, however, stores tend to order pretty tightly. They usually order enough to cover their subscribers with a couple of extra copies for their stands. As the months go by, if the store starts to notice that those extra copies fail to move, they'll order less and less.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 17, 2017, 07:22:38 AM
... And just to clarify, I believe they're saying "six" issues "to be published each year", not six ongoing digest titles.

Might this take the place of a vanishing Sonic digest?

Quote from: Ottawagrant on February 09, 2017, 11:35:47 AM
One has to wonder if the reboot of Archie titles was not just a big ploy to give them time to make the company look attractive to a potential buyer.

I've been wondering this for the past few years. It would explain how short-sighted their strategies have been and their poor execution.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on October 27, 2016, 06:41:37 AM

Fernando Ruiz did some variant covers for Dynamite Entertainment's first issue of KISS, and possibly some others.

Currently, I'm writing and drawing Animal Jam for Dynamite Comics. This past year I've also written and drawn a couple of stories for Boo: The World's Cutest Dog also for Dynamite.


Keep up with my latest projects and appearances over at my site: Fernandoruizeverybody.com


http://fernandoruizeverybody.com/inked-page-from-die-kitty-die-hollywood-or-bust-1/