WEEK OF 08-16-17:
SILVER SURFER #13 (of 14)
X-MEN BLUE #9
SPY SEAL #1 (of 6)
UNCLE SCROOGE #433
ROM #12
INVINCIBLE #139
WORLD WAR TANK GIRL #4 (of 4)
KILL THE MINOTAUR #3 (of 6)
SOUTHERN BASTARDS #17
ASTRO CITY #46
DARK NIGHTS: METAL #1 (of 6)
FUTURE QUEST PRESENTS SPACE GHOST #1 (of ?)
SANDMAN SPECIAL #1 (one-shot)
SHEENA #0
KISS/VAMPIRELLA #3 (of 5)
MIGHTY MOUSE #3
MICRONAUTS WRATH OF KARZA #4 (of 5)
STAR TREK TNG: THE MIRROR BROKEN #3 (of 6)
ANNO DRACULA #5 (of 5)
ZOMBIES ASSEMBLE 2 #1 (of 4)

Quote from: SAGG on August 15, 2017, 10:37:31 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 15, 2017, 02:44:34 PM

Quote from: SAGG on August 14, 2017, 10:41:53 PM
Heh. "ChAos". "Chaos", as in what is happening at ACP. Quite the Freudian slip there, DR. Or was it? 

Chaos (or "Khaos") Magick is another name for Black Magic, SAGG. I'm not sure, but I think it may have originated as RPGing terminology, since "alignments" with either Order or Chaos are important character attributes in game characters. (A magician, sorcerer, warlock or witch aligned with Order would be a user of White Magick.) A Chaos magician is increasing the balance of Chaos over Order in the universe by helping spread disorder and disharmony.

When Chilling Adventures of Sabrina first came out, I realized that was going to be too long to type more than once, so I went for an acronym, the same as people started abbreviating Afterlife With Archie as AWA. "CAS" may be even shorter, but it just isn't as serendipitous as "ChAoS" for Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I've been abbreviating it that way every time I have had occasion to comment on it since it debuted. I don't call it merely "Sabrina" to distinguish it from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which I've been known to comment on from time to time, possibly even within a post discussing ChAoS -- and in my mind at least, the two Sabrinas are really completely different characters.

I was just being facetious, DR. You know, tongue in cheek....

It seemed like you thought I was making a subtle commentary on the state of the company, but I've been using the acronym for some time now. Not that the company has been anything less than chaotic in the entire time Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has been in existence...

It's chaos of their own making, because they fail to have any real vision for anything but the short-term. They keep asking themselves what kind of gimmick can they come up with next to get some fan-buzz or awareness, but they really only have the most nebulous concept of what kind of company they are, or what kind of comics it is that they publish... or should publish. It's all bluster and swagger, and trying to talk a good game. Their only publishing philosophy seems to be "Archie can be anything, and currently it's whatever we decide to say it is." Jon Goldwater loves to talk it up like we're living in the Renaissance period of ACP, but the truth of the matter is that they are taking in less and less profit on floppy comics every year, and they've been on a downhill slide since the peak sales of Archie #1 in 2015. The number of cancellations of newly-solicited products has never been higher, but particularly for titles in the floppy comic format. The bulk of their profit is still being derived from reprints -- the digest titles, and trade collections. IMO the company's biggest conceptual mistake is in deciding to hinge its future on the direct market and the floppy comic format. They should be directing all their efforts outside of that market, because that's where their real audience is found. That means they have to forge new distribution alliances and partnerships, and develop new content in other formats for audiences outside of comic shops. If they really really can't be dissuaded from pinning all their hopes on the direct market and the floppy format, then their best bet would be to forget all about Archie and create entirely new titles and characters for that market from scratch, and change the company name, because "Archie" is exactly what's holding them back from being taken seriously by those consumers. But then they would be faced with the challenge of actually having to create new things out of whole cloth, a concept that clearly petrifies them.

I knew all of that stuff, and of course I'd seen the story before as well. I don't know about the article's headline though. It seems to try to imply that Schwartz moved to Miami because of some rift with ACP, or reduced work, but that isn't the case. In fact the article correctly states that he moved there in 1979, long before his regular Jughead work was reduced with the launching of the all new JUGHEAD #1 in 1987. Also, Samm was well-known for working references to his name (and others) into his stories, even though more often than not that turned out to be a very background in-joke kind of thing. In this particular story it's part of the central plot (but he can be forgiven because he didn't move to Florida more than once).

I just want to make it clear that Jughead (or ACP) didn't drive his main artist/writer out of town. Not that time, anyway. Back in 1968 when the powers that be discovered he was moonlighting editing and creating stories for Tower Comics' TIPPY TEEN, he got fired outright. That's why when Tower folded only a year later he didn't come back begging for work, but went to DC instead. DC still had a few humor comics at the time (SCOOTER and BINKY), but A Date With DEBBI (later DEBBI's Dates) was created by Samm, as an updated version of the old DC title A Date With JUDY. Apart from Bob Oskner's Angel & The Ape (which was a little different since it co-starred a talking gorilla cartoonist/detective), it was the only DC humor title to feature a female protagonist. DC paid much higher page rates than ACP anyway, and Samm stayed there as long as the humor work still held out, but it was only a couple of years longer. When the DC humor work dried up he finally returned to JUGHEAD. I don't know what kind of reception he received upon his return, but obviously they were being pragmatic in realizing his talents were still needed at the company, so if there were still any grudges held against him, I guess they were overruled.

Quote from: SAGG on August 14, 2017, 10:41:53 PM
Heh. "ChAos". "Chaos", as in what is happening at ACP. Quite the Freudian slip there, DR. Or was it? 

Chaos (or "Khaos") Magick is another name for Black Magic, SAGG. I'm not sure, but I think it may have originated as RPGing terminology, since "alignments" with either Order or Chaos are important character attributes in game characters. (A magician, sorcerer, warlock or witch aligned with Order would be a user of White Magick.) A Chaos magician is increasing the balance of Chaos over Order in the universe by helping spread disorder and disharmony.

When Chilling Adventures of Sabrina first came out, I realized that was going to be too long to type more than once, so I went for an acronym, the same as people started abbreviating Afterlife With Archie as AWA. "CAS" may be even shorter, but it just isn't as serendipitous as "ChAoS" for Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I've been abbreviating it that way every time I have had occasion to comment on it since it debuted. I don't call it merely "Sabrina" to distinguish it from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which I've been known to comment on from time to time, possibly even within a post discussing ChAoS -- and in my mind at least, the two Sabrinas are really completely different characters.

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 14, 2017, 03:33:47 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 14, 2017, 02:49:47 PM
Now that I think about it, the whole Adam Hughes' B&V thing has been pretty disastrous for the company. ... what B&V contributed to the company was 3 issues that took an entire year to come out. That is bad. ... Get a stable creative team that will commit to the title for at least 12 issues, and can deliver pages on time every 6 weeks, or less.

This has me wondering why writers and/or artists can get away with slow work in the first place. Shouldn't it be built into their contracts: "You will provide the script and/or artwork on this schedule, or the contract is terminated"?

Depends on who you think was in the power position in that particular instance. Adam Hughes does not NEED a paycheck from Archie Comics. Someone at ACP decided THEY needed Adam Hughes. The problem was they felt they needed him too badly, and were willing to wait for his work as long as it took. They set themselves up for disaster... after advertising an Adam Hughes story, what are they going to do when issue #2 isn't done by the contractual deadline? "Cancel the contract"?? Oh yeah, and then just get someone else to write & draw issue #2. That's going to make them look like total idiots, advertising Adam Hughes and then pulling the old "bait & switch"... upon which, sales immediately plummet like a stone. So it was no-win for them once they committed to riding the AH!-train. You know what a company like DC Comics would have done? They would have paid Adam Hughes his money IF they were committed to needing him for whatever project. And they would have waited. Waited until he delivered all his work, or was close enough to completing the final issue, before scheduling and soliciting the first issue. And if you're DC Comics, you can do that because you have the money to pay Adam Hughes for 3 issues of a comic book upfront. If you're Archie Comic Publications, you're living from one printer's bill to the next, and one check from Diamond Comic Distributors to the next. You can't pay this guy what you owe him until you get that money you were expecting from that last comic you published.

Just like someone at ACP decided that Mr. Big-Shot TV Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa needed to be courted and wooed ("Ooooo! We'll make you Chief Creative Officer!"), and you do NOT dictate terms to the guy you're begging to get your intellectual properties on TV.

If you're someone like Ian Flynn (who is a fine writer, and I mean him no disrespect for using him as an example), you probably can't afford to be a temperamental artiste who can only write when his creative muse inspires him, because you know they can hire someone else to do the job for the same money.

Now that I think about it, the whole Adam Hughes' B&V thing has been pretty disastrous for the company. What were they thinking, trying to publish Reggie and Josie titles before they could even get an ongoing (as in published at least bi-monthly) Betty and Veronica title established as a stable title?

Instead, what B&V contributed to the company was 3 issues that took an entire year to come out. That is bad. It's worse for a company that already publishes two other "ongoing" titles that only manage to come out once a year: Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It sends THIS message to the consumers: "Don't get involved. It will only lead to frustration. They love to promise more than they can actually deliver. It's not worth the grief."

If they'd been thinking, they would have made a B&V title the very next priority after the rebooted Archie. Get a stable creative team that will commit to the title for at least 12 issues, and can deliver pages on time every 6 weeks, or less. Jughead should have been title #3, and once that was up and running, THEN, and only then, with both Archie and B&V coming out on a regular basis, something like Josie, or Reggie, or Veronica, or Betty, or Sabrina. Not too quickly... they should have let B&V build for a year before the next big title, Jughead. Then another 6-8 months before the next title, but only once they'd established some stability.

Between AWA, ChAoS, B&V, and all the various solicit-then-cancel products, they torpedoed any credibility they might have had as a publisher.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on August 13, 2017, 04:52:19 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 13, 2017, 04:16:53 PM

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on August 12, 2017, 06:27:52 PM
I'm pretty sure we'll see a Your Pal Archie-style Betty and Veronica before long.

I wish I had your optimism about it, Vegan. I'm more worried right now about how many issues of YPA we can get before the plug is pulled. Ideally I would wish for "more than 22", but... comic shop consumers seem to give any kind of humor series a chilly reception.

Oh you didn't know YPA is already just a 5 issue miniseries?  Dan Parent says it "might" go further, but as I said before he hinted at another series or something and maybe that will be B&V.  I just can't see Archie having Vixens be the only Betty and Veronica product.  B&V are their most popular characters.

Oh, I know the initial contract for YPA is just 5 issues. But I'd assume that any similar take on B&V would be contingent on whether or not YPA is able to sustain an audience, so it hardly seems likely to me that if YPA doesn't sell well enough, it would be replaced by a B&V title in the same style. Even IF such a title were to materialize, I'd hardly expect it to run more than 4 or 5 issues, or sell any better than YPA. To be honest, I really don't expect that YPA will run more than the initial allotment of 5 issues, sad to say. That's why it seems to me that you're being overly optimistic about the chances for a similar B&V title. I'd love to be wrong about that, but realistically, the odds don't seem good. I doubt that VIXENS will turn out to be an ongoing title, either.

I'm not quite convinced that B&V are currently more popular as their own franchise than ARCHIE. I think that you can certainly point to where that was the case for many years, but now...? I'm not sure if that's still true. It's true that the last ongoing floppy comic in the classic style to be cancelled was B&V, which continued for a few more issues after ARCHIE #666, but that's because they'd already committed to Michael Uslan's multi-part story. And while the classic ARCHIE title was replaced two months later by a newly rebooted #1 issue, after B&V ended with #278, it took a whole nine months before Adam Hughes' rebooted 1st issue appeared -- not to mention the 6-month gaps between issues 1 & 2, and 2 & 3. For "their most popular characters", it's awfully strange that ACP would allow so few issues of B&V to appear in the space of two years. THREE issues in 2 years?? Granted AH is slow and they knew that, but couldn't they have done something else with the characters to fill the gap? I can see that you're upset about the Vixens idea, but in reality if it follows fairly closely on the heels of the Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica miniseries, it will be a lot more issues of B&V than we've seen in a long time.

Those first couple of Adam Hughes B&V issues did more than respectable numbers in sales, but I'd say that had a lot more to do with Adam Hughes than with the B&V name. Still nowhere near as impressive as the sales on the initial issues of the rebooted Archie title, either. Or even on "The Death of Archie".

It might still be the case that B&V Double Digest outsells any of the Archie digests, but I'm not entirely convinced of that. World of Archie and Archie Double Digest are still at the 10x/yearly frequency, and while B&V Double Digest is still 10x/yearly, B&V Friends is only 6x/yearly. I have no real proof, but I'd suspect that either WoA or Archie Double Digest is now the best-selling of the digest titles.

Looking at the trade collections from the last ten years, the preponderance of titles released have the ARCHIE logo on the cover in large letters, and there have been relatively few B&V collections by comparison. Perhaps most tellingly, to date there has still been no trade collection of that last "Farewell, Betty & Veronica" multi-part storyline. All of the comparable multi-part Archie storylines got trade collections. No TP collections for those Jughead multi-parters "Jughead Jones, Semi-Private Eye" and "A Jughead in the Family" (a.k.a. "Movin' In") either.

I think ACP thought that the new reboot of Archie would lead to an entire line of ongoing titles featuring all of the characters who traditionally had had ongoing titles. I hate to say it, but with the cancellation of the New Riverdale iterations of Reggie and Me, Jughead, and Josie, it seems fated not to be. There seems to be just enough of an audience to support ONE ongoing title in the floppy comic format, and right now that title is Archie. I don't think The Archies or Jughead: The Hunger will last, either. I'm sure they'll continue to come up with one-shots and miniseries re-imagining the characters in various different situations, along the lines of AWA (which published its last issue a year ago) and Vixens, but they're all "novelty acts" destined for short runs, no matter how much of a happy face Jon Goldwater tries to put on the situation with his claims of having brilliantly re-invented the company for the 21st Century.

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on August 12, 2017, 06:27:52 PM
I'm pretty sure we'll see a Your Pal Archie-style Betty and Veronica before long.

I wish I had your optimism about it, Vegan. I'm more worried right now about how many issues of YPA we can get before the plug is pulled. Ideally I would wish for "more than 22", but... comic shop consumers seem to give any kind of humor series a chilly reception.

Quote from: Ryanarcher on August 12, 2017, 07:05:03 PM
Thanks, everyone.  I agree with all of you.  I guess what I am also asking is, even if we all pretty much can assume the title is cancelled, has there been official word to that effect?  Because nothing has been said officially, to the best of my knowledge.  Thanks again to all!

That's just sort of the standard ACP operating procedure. They definitely prefer to get some positive publicity hype going as soon as possible for whatever their next forthcoming project is, and move ahead and forget whatever failure may have just occurred, or whatever solicitation for an intended product was quietly cancelled without alerting anyone but distributors and retailers to that fact. One thing you won't ever be reading in an ACP comic book news story is "We're sorry to report..." or "We regret to inform our fans...". From a business perspective, they prefer to ignore the negative facts and pretend they never happened.

To be absolutely fair to ACP, technically no one can factually claim that Betty & Veronica was "cancelled", because that would be contingent on the company actually having solicited for orders an issue #4 of that title, and later failed to publish it. Can the company be blamed if readers of issue numbers 1 through 3 of B&V simply assumed, because nothing had been said regarding the word "miniseries" or "limited series", that there was an ongoing title to cancel?

Some thoughts on those two longer Little Archie stories, now that I've read them. "On Mars" is 14 pages and semi-predictable in some of its elements, but I enjoyed it enough, I guess. Characters unique to the story included the Martians Abercrombie and Snitch, and a brief appearance by a purple Plutonian alien beatnik, who shared a cage with LA in the Martian Zoo.

The other story, "The Strange Case of the Mystery Map" was almost twice as long at 29 pages, and considerably more interesting to me. I'm guessing it must have first appeared in one of the 25c Little Archie Giant issues. LA is more of a minor character in this one, a straight action-adventure tale, whose main characters included Jimmy Lee, earnest young office boy of The Riverdale Register, also a photographer who aspires to make his mark as a cub reporter for the paper. Jimmy rides a motorcycle (he also has a motorboat, later in the story). LA happens to be talking with Jimmy when the two witness an attempted holdup in broad daylight at the pawn shop belonging to an elderly woman. Only the "elderly woman" uses judo to toss her two thuggish attackers out the door of the shop. Seeing a potential news story, Jimmy and LA question her, and she's suspiciously reticent to discuss her business and tries to avoid any publicity. She hurriedly disappears out the back, but Jimmy tracks her and witnesses her disappear into a clothing store's changing room, only to emerge later as a beautiful young girl whose name we later learn is Toni Greenwood. She notices their trailing of her and disappears into thin air at the river's edge, but it later turns out that she's the niece of Riverdale's most eccentric millionaire recluse, Caleb Wharton, who obsessively hates newspapers. Toni presents her uncle with information found hidden in the back room of the pawn shop that will lead to the location of Caleb's pirate ancestor's secret treasure map. There's a lot more to it, of course, but I don't want to spoil everything.

No, I think what you're getting for B&V is discrete limited series:
Adam Hughes' Betty & Veronica
Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica
Betty & Veronica: Vixens

Presumably the latter title could be extended into a continuing series, if sales were particularly good, but initially ACP's contract with the creators would specify a story arc composed of a specific number of issues (usually 4 to 6, to make a collected edition reprint possible). On the other hand, if sales projections don't look that promising after a couple of issues, then it's already time to get back to work brainstorming some new angle or spin on the characters, so they can have something to promote and create awareness of that important character franchise.

In the case of Adam Hughes' reboot, I think ACP was fully aware when they started that they would not be able to afford Hughes' services on a continuing series, but they decided to invest the money in his talent as a boost to what they may have foreseen as an ongoing relaunched title... only the delay between issues and mixed critical reactions to the series may have torpedoed that original vision. Those huge 6-month gaps between issues effectively killed whatever momentum that title might have built, resulting in a huge drop in sales with issue #3, so at that point ACP probably decided that a complete do-over was the best option, to distance the characters from any bad feelings. They might have continued with #4 had there been a visible anticipation among readers building with Hughes' 3 issue arc, but reader reaction in general said that a lot of them had soured on it by the time it concluded. Any continuation of the series beyond Hughes' 3 issues would have been very iffy and dependent on readers' reception to the new creative team anyway.

I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised to discover that manga collections, when sold in Japanese bookstores, are categorized in any other way than by separating them into their own demographic sections, according to gender and age. "Men's comics", "Women's comics", "Boys' comics", "Girls' comics".

Here in North America, however, manga collections are routinely just alphabetized by title in bookstores.

In comic book shops, floppy comics are all sorted by some combination of alphabetically and/or by major publisher, a with a small minority of "Kids' comics" sequestered off to the safety of their own little island or corner. At least after they've all been moved out of the "This Week's Comics/New Releases" section.

That right there tells you something. Those two consumer bases in two different countries are completely different animals, because the surrounding culture dictates so.

Quote from: terrence12 on August 11, 2017, 09:16:22 PM

Quote from: irishmoxie on August 11, 2017, 02:12:24 PM
Why oh why can't they make a Betty and Veronica series marketed towards women?

You know,That's a good question.Why Archie couldn't make some betty and Veronica comics aimed at women,Even though the times are changing that people can read whatever they like gender or not.

VIXENS is written by a woman (Jamie Rotante), and drawn by a woman (Eva Cabrera). Why would you think it wouldn't be marketed towards women? If the concept doesn't float your boat at all, then perhaps you should discuss the topic of why all women don't like the same type of comics with Jamie Rotante, whose idea it was. It would be a mistaken assumption to think that all women just naturally like the same comics that you do. Do you think all men like exactly the same type of comics? The biggest thing I think you're missing here is that ALL comics combined have such a tiny audience relatively speaking, compared to television and movies. MOST people have no interest in comics whatsoever, whether they are male or female, but historically, far fewer women have adopted the the habit of reading those traditional floppy comic books. Many may feel such a stigma towards the format that they wouldn't even consider touching them, while they may not necessarily feel the same about a graphic novel or a manga paperback. But that's assuming they've been exposed to comics in that format to begin with, which is by no means a given. These aren't always so obvious considerations to female readers of digital format comics, because they just assume anyone could get them, so what's the problem? I think it's more a question of "But why would they want to in the first place?" If you assume there's nothing of interest to you there, then you're not looking -- but publishers can't sell female-oriented titles to a potential audience that isn't even looking.

But if you want a real answer to your question in general, just look at all the attempts Marvel (especially) has made to market comics written and drawn by women, featuring female protagonists. There just aren't enough women readers reading comics in the floppy format, that mainly have to be purchased from a comic book store, to support a title all by themselves. If the title doesn't also appeal to male readers as well, then it's certainly doomed to be cancelled right from the start. That may work fine for manga paperbacks, but that's because both the economics and the distribution are entirely different.

Let's take a look at that cover again... (this is the main cover, with artwork by interior artist Eva Cabrera).



Maybe I'm a little dense here, but could you tell me, specifically, what it is about that cover image that seems to you like it's obviously appealing to a male reader, as opposed to a female one? Because I can easily think of at least a half-dozen things about that design that are dead wrong in terms of M-appeal.

A couple of other things I forgot to mention here about stories I found surprising. There's one Gladir/DeCarlo Sabrina story here where she's reminiscing about when she was a little girl (which also includes an appearance by Harvey), that I would bet dollars to donuts pre-dates any appearances of Little Sabrina in the Little Archie stories. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, I don't think Bolling ever used Little Sabrina in his original run on Little Archie, and she was first incorporated into the strip by Dexter Taylor after he had taken over the writing and art on Little Archie.

There's one Little Archie story here by Bolling that's quite recent because I saw it as the lead story in one of the digests within the past couple of years ("The New Kid"), and although it's a 5-page short, it does involve a fantasy angle, where an alien kid lands his UFO on earth and meets up with Little Archie, who's on his way to a costume party, and naturally both Little Archie and the kids at the party think the alien kid is just another friend in a weird costume, before Little Archie eventually learns the truth.

Also notable was a story in which Veronica appears in a Josie story when Alexander's car has trouble, and she stops to offer Josie and Alex a lift. Alex's bloated ego is profoundly insulted when Veronica asks him to wipe the mud off his feet before getting in the car. He refuses the ride, and determines to revenge himself for what he considers Veronica's insult. He knows not who he's dealing with...

ARCHIE'S BIG BOOK: MAGIC, MUSIC & MISCHIEF is a full-sized (same page size as a standard comic book), 304-page collection of some of the best stories (all older ones) from Sabrina, Josie and Little Archie. I get the impression that they're putting this out to try to build familiarity with Archie readers for these, their next three biggest character franchises, and you really couldn't ask for a better introductory volume.

MAGIC: Most of the Sabrina stories here were just recently reprinted in the SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH COMPLETE COLLECTION v1, which I reviewed above, but there they were printed in black & white at the smaller page size used for the Best of Archie Comics trade collection. Here they're full-sized and in color. The editor selected all Dan DeCarlo-illustrated stories (with one exception, a short drawn by Stan Goldberg) for this collection, including all of his key earliest ones from Archie's Madhouse. The rest are choice early stories from Archie's TV Laugh-Out, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and one from Sabrina's Christmas Magic.

It was when I was counting the pages that I noticed there are just about 80 pages of Sabrina stories here, and that the cover illustration of Sabrina (which is also used in a larger image for the title page of the Sabrina section) is the same one that appeared as the cover of the formerly-solicited, then cancelled, SABRINA 80-PAGE GIANT, so I think if that comic had actually been published these are exactly the same stories you would have seen reprinted in that 80-Page Giant. While there are a few more than 80 pages in both the Josie and Little Archie section, I noted (again) that the images used on both the cover of this collection and the title pages of those characters' sections were the same as the ones that appeared on the covers for the respective 80-PAGE GIANT comics solicited, then cancelled, for JOSIE and LITTLE ARCHIE, so I'm guessing that 80 pages out of each of those sections would have made up those Giant comics.

MUSIC: Well, not all music. Three of the longer stories that begin this section ("A Gym Dandy", "Footlight Follies", and "Sweater Girls") are non-musical/non-Pussycats stories reprinted in their entirety (they were book-length stories) from early issues of She's Josie. Issues #1-3, in fact. I couldn't have been more delighted. I consider the longer early stories of She's Josie to be the very best stories Archie Comic Publications have ever produced, and these three showcase the talent of Frank Doyle and Dan DeCarlo at the height of their artistic powers. If ACP is ever wondering how to produce a new comic book that will actually be good, then they should dissect and analyze the way these stories are written and structured, and try to adapt that to stories about modern teenagers taking place today. I'm not saying they could do it, but they should at least attempt it. Josie was an interesting creation, because it involved the three main female characters taken from a proposed newspaper strip which Dan DeCarlo tried, and failed, to interest newspaper syndicate editors in. The male characters didn't come from those prototype strips though. They came from the last thing that Frank Doyle and Dan DeCarlo had worked on together, which was "The NEW" Wilbur. If you look carefully at Albert and Alexander, they're really just Wilbur and his rival Alec from the aforementioned series, with slightly different hairstyles and more stylish (for 1963) clothes. Albert even originally had the same flattop/brushcut hairstyle as Wilbur's, except that Wilbur was blond, and tended to dress more like the 1950s Archie, with letter sweatervests, saddle shoes, and checkered pants. The main difference here between Alec (from Wilbur) and Alexander Cabot is that instead of just being upper-middle class like Reggie Mantle, Alexander Cabot is filthy rich like the Lodges, and just as spoiled by it as Veronica. Otherwise the early Alexander looks and acts almost identically with Wilbur's rival Alec. Then there is Sock (short for Socrates, by the way, in case you didn't know), the big, dumb, (but good-natured) jock athlete who's absolutely bananas for Pepper and would do anything for her. He's an evolution of Tiny, who played a similar role (inspired by Moose, of course) in Wilbur's stories. Then there's Pepper, who had a namesake in the earlier Wilbur stories, but was nothing like Josie's Pepper, personality-wise. Although she may have taken some personality bits from a character in Wilber named Dodo. I have been fascinated by how "The NEW Wilbur" fits into the picture of characters' evolution in Archie Comics ever since I began noticing all the similarities. It's not so obvious, when you look at the characters of Alexander, who evolved considerably further in later stories of Josie and the Pussycats, and even Albert and Pepper evolved a little differently towards the end -- before being dropped altogether to make way for Alan M. Mayberry and Valerie Brown (later Smith). Did I mention that all the Josie stories (including the Pussycats ones) reprinted in this collection are also illustrated by Dan DeCarlo? All except one, just like in the previous Sabrina section. There's one final short drawn by Stan Goldberg, reprinted from years later than the original run of J&tP.

MISCHIEF: I'm not going to lie to you. I didn't actually read this section yet. But they all look to be early LA stories written and drawn by Bob Bolling. Bolling is an interesting writer to me, because he has very specific tastes, and includes very distinctive elements of fantasy, mystery, adventure and the supernatural in his stories (that goes for most of them, if he's allowed the page length to develop those ideas, regardless if it's a regular Archie story, a Betty story, or a Little Archie story). The shorter Little Archie stories rarely have those elements in them, and those are the ones mainly reprinted in the digests. This section contains at least two longer (both look to be book-length) stories containing those elements, that I plan on reading later. They are "Little Archie on Mars" and "The Strange Case of the Mystery Map". These both seem to contain complex plots, and other interesting incidental characters. I couldn't tell you what it is about stories featuring mainly a cast of primary-school children that disinterest me, but it is what it is.