Quote from: irishmoxie on August 23, 2017, 06:53:41 PM
They've been doing that bait and switch forever. I remember my first Betty and Veronica digest had Cheryl on the cover despite having no Cheryl story inside. She was staring in her own series at the time.
People who have been reading the digest titles for years have probably already noticed this, but a decade or more ago, the digests contained a significantly larger number of new story pages. Back in that time it was common for the covers to depict a scene from one of the new stories inside, and these stories could be anywhere from 10-20 pages. That was back when Nelson Riberio was the digest editor. ACP still published both regular and Double Digest titles devoted to its most popular characters, there were 8 ongoing digest titles, and the Archie digests were outselling just about every comic book published in the direct market.
Since Ribero left ACP (he went to work for Marvel's reprint collections division) the digests shifted to gag covers, and then to covers featuring mostly generic scenes from which the cover artwork could be re-used in a variety of different formats. The number of new story pages was reduced, and for a couple of years new stories disappeared from the digests altogether, before being restored to a standardized single new 5-page story per digest issue in 2014. Also since that time ACP has ceased to publish the "regular" (96-page) digest format, and the number of titles has dropped from 8, to 6 ongoing titles... and it looks like it's about to become just 4 ongoing titles.
We already knew that JUGHEAD AND ARCHIE was ending (I just got the final issue, #27) and being replaced by ARCHIE AND ME Digest, but the last solicitation for issues of both ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE (#28) and B & V FRIENDS (#256) appeared in July's PREVIEWS (supposed to ship in September), and there should have been a solicitation for another issue in the September PREVIEWS catalog (for shipping in November), but none materialized. Barring a solicitation in October's catalog for an early December shipping date, it looks like this might be the end for Archie's Funhouse and B & V Friends, or maybe they'll be replaced by new digest titles, hard to say.