Quote from: Fernando Ruiz on April 10, 2016, 01:00:44 PMQuote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 10, 2016, 06:17:04 AM
Raj first appeared in TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #21 in 2008 - in a story written and drawn by Fernando Ruiz. I don't know if he's responsible for creating the character himself... maybe he'll see this and comment on that.
Ahh... Raj...
[...]
That's my Raj story.
Thank you for that long and very detailed reply, Fernando. I hesitated to just say you were the "creator" of Raj (as one would mostly assume with a story written and drawn by the same artist), because I suspected some degree of editorial input there on that particular character (although I couldn't be sure how much). The story behind the story was fascinating.
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.