Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2016, 04:32:05 PM
TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST, once I discovered it, turned out to be one of the most interesting digest titles (IMHO) that ACP ever published, along with JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST, both of which were published concurrently for nearly 40 issues -- a fact that I attribute largely to your involvement in contributing new stories to each issue (or most issues, at any rate -- I've yet to read all of them), and to the fact that you were throwing new characters in there, like Raj and Wendy Weatherbee (I need to find all the stories beyond those two digests where she had a co-starring, as opposed to merely a supporting role in the story), and occasionally even featuring Bingo Wilkin (a personal favorite) in new stories.
JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST is the best of all the various Jughead digests I've read, not only because of the inclusion of the regular Wilkin Boy reprints, but because nearly every issue had a perfect blend of Jughead stories by Samm Schwartz (classic era), Boldman & Lindsay (late 1990s-2000s), and you (the new story in each issue, plus some other reprints of yours that seemed fairly recent). I'm currently working my way through those, and enjoying the heck out of each one.
Thanks. To me, those two titles, Tales From Riverdale and Jughead & Friends, were the Golden Age of my work on the digests. I especially loved Tales From Riverdale where I really tried my best to experiment. Probably my favorite character of the ones that I created was Wendy Weatherbee. I thought she had a ton of potential and I was looking forward to developing her more. Alas...
Sadly, it seems both Tales and J&F were the lowest selling digests of their time. This led Archie Comics to conclude that digests, other than the Betty & Veronica digests, HAD to have Archie's name in the title. This led to Jughead & Friends to be replaced by Jughead & Archie. Tales From Riverdale was replaced either by World Of Archie or Archie's Funhouse.
There was a very, very brief moment where ALL the digests were going to be replaced by "Super Digests." (I swear that's what they were going to be called! Very quickly, though, someone got cold feet about using the word "super" in a title so they were going to be called something else at one point.) These were going to be larger, bigger digests. It actually sounded like a bold idea, but as I said this was a very brief moment. For reasons I never learned, the "Super Digests" idea was scrapped and the digests remained the size they are.