Quote from: The Downloader on July 15, 2017, 06:28:32 AM
Hopefully they get a surplus in cash to release new titles, or rebooted ones, such as the actual "Archie's Madhouse", or maybe a new darker "Cosmo" series.

They should just do a Little Archie horror comic, since the original is probably the "classic Archie" title that arguably came closest to that genre in its original incarnation.

Quote from: rusty on July 14, 2017, 09:46:18 AM
I hope that digital sales go through the roof since that will help keep titles afloat. I've read a number of predictions in recent years about the imminent death of the floppy, but I just don't see it in the near future. Maybe some day.

I'm not sure I follow that logic. It makes more sense to make a title digital-exclusive if it sells through the roof in that format, but the print sales are barely enough to recoup the publisher's bills from the printer. Seems to me in that situation it makes more sense to cancel the print comic (if I were the publisher) if it's barely breaking even or even costing the publisher money.

When you see all the titles barely selling a few thousand copies, you have to wonder about the future of floppy comics. It's different if you're selling a few thousand copies of a trade collection, because the cover price is something like 5 times that of a floppy comic.

Quote from: rusty on July 15, 2017, 10:47:06 AM
it could happen just as easily with a trade paperback collection.  It doesn't happen too often, though - maybe 1 or 2 series each year.

Nope, it never happens. All of the the material appearing in trade or hardcover has appeared before, unless it's an "OGN". Those are pretty rare in American comics publishing. Otherwise it's stuff I've already seen before, so I'm well aware of what I'm getting. In a few instances where I have absolute confidence in the creators of the material, I may defer reading it in the cheaper format before buying the trade because I want to wait to read it all together in one shot.

Some creators whose work I generally enjoy don't always hit a home run every time at bat though, and I generally know which ones those are. I've enjoyed most of the Millarworld comics up through MPH and Huck, but recent ones like Chrononauts, Empress, and Reborn just didn't do anything for me. I never finished Chrononauts and didn't even bother reading past #1 of Reborn because the concept just wasn't interesting me, so I won't be getting trades on those.

Conversely, I could pick up any new series Ed Brubaker writes (if I could stand to wait that long) in the Deluxe HC edition and never have to worry whether it was going to deliver or not. Somehow or other I had missed one of the floppies of Velvet and got behind on it, and I realized I was having a hard time following the twists of plot because of reading it serialized that way, so I just gave up on reading the floppies at that point and decided to wait for the hardcover collecting the entire 15 issues. It read a lot better and made more sense that way, even though I'd be a liar if I said I didn't enjoy reading the individual issues. It's just that I can't remember every detail from months earlier, so it was easier to follow the plot that way.

Resident Alien is also one of my favorites, and one where I just skip reading the floppies and wait for the trade because they read better that way. Lobster Johnson's another great title but I do like reading the singles as they come out, then I get the trade later to keep. I wish it could come out more often, but Tonci Zonjic is just a slow (but excellent) artist.

I enjoyed the Judge Dredd vs Predator vs Aliens (still waiting for the collection on that one) and the Tarzan/Planet of the Apes crossover. Unfortunately the Green Lantern/Planet of the Apes miniseries was pretty weak both story and art-wise, so I won't be getting that TP, even though I enjoyed both of the Star Trek/Green Lantern miniseries and the Star Trek/Planet of the Apes series. Nothing to do with Dark Horse I know, but most of the DC/IDW and IDW/Boom crossovers have been good up to now, so I don't know if they're starting to just "mail it in", confident that people will buy it no matter who writes and draws it. The problem with  Dark Horse's JDvPvA was that it took forever for all 4 issues to come out (just about a year, IIRC). Most of the Judge Dredd crossover stories have been good, and this one was no exception, but there's probably no excuse for taking that long between issues. I guess it's all relative, if we compared that to Afterlife With Archie, then it makes JDvPvA look like it was over and done in an eyeblink.

Quote from: irishmoxie on July 14, 2017, 10:28:26 PM
My main county library has floppy comics now! I went there and they had the latest issues of Jem.

Interesting. You are the first person that I'm aware of to report this. Which makes me wonder -- were these comics that you could borrow and take home like a regular library book? I guess that would mean they'd need to have a little pocket with a card in it glued on in the back of the comic. I don't imagine that floppy comics could stand up to much handling under normal library usage.

If they could only be read on the premises of the library and not taken out, it would seem to make more sense for libraries to have subsciptions to digital comics which would be available to read on the library's computers. Then they wouldn't need to worry about damage to the comics, or storing and filing them.

They should have had Audrey Mok drawing this title. Maybe it'll be more interesting as a series than it was as a one-shot, but I have my doubts. It's almost as if there is a carved-in-stone editorial edict against putting too much humor into the stories at ACP now. I guess they felt like they could get away with it more in JUGHEAD because otherwise if Jughead is treated too seriously, nobody would believe it.

I guess with floppy comics I always felt that the immediacy of "this week's comics" is what kept that format going. As in, there are tons of comics being published every month, so you can't read them all -- so every floppy comic you read is informing you about adjustments you need to make to your reading (and spending) patterns.

If you save up six issues of a new miniseries that you were pretty sure you were going to enjoy when you decided to buy it, then read the first issue and it stinks, now what do you do? What if the second issue stinks just as bad? Do you tough it out and read them all, even though it's now a chore because you obviously made a bad choice, but having spent the money already, you feel like you need to justify it? Even worse if you're reading a lot of Marvel and DC comics, when there's some line-wide event thing going on. Can you be sure you're reading them all in the correct order according to the week they were released? And what if, a few issues in (to a crossover that involves dozens of comics) you're not even liking the story?

I used to read about 75-80% of all the "universe" titles Marvel and DC published, but gimmick storylines and crossovers really burnt me out on those publishers. For Marvel, I essentially stopped buying floppies after Dark Reign ended with Siege. Those massive months-long stories just never seemed to have any real dramatic payoff, they just ground to a halt, while simultaneously planting a number of seeds for the next upcoming crossover event. TBH, that had already happened for me with the X-Men and Spider-Man titles back in the early 1990s. After Siege, I kept reading a few things like Ed Brubaker's Captain America, Matt Fraction's Iron Man, and Mark Waid's Daredevil, mainly because I'd been reading them since the beginnings of those runs, but eventually they got around to cancelling/renumbering or changing creative teams, and I stopped reading when the writers I liked stopped writing them. Other Marvel titles which I've read since that time usually got cancelled fairly quickly, running around 15 issues or less. As of right now I'm down to reading just Dan Slott and Mike Allred's Silver Surfer and Jeff Lemire and Mike Deodato's Thanos, Cullen Bunn's X-Men Blue (which I don't imagine will last long for me) and the occasional miniseries (R.L. Stein's Man-Thing was fun), plus I'll read some first issues here and there, just to check them out, but I'm finding fewer and fewer Marvels to read.

With DC, it was after Flashpoint (which was terrible) resulted in the New 52 reboot. Again, I stopped buying the floppies, but kept on reading the Geoff Johns/Peter Tomasi Green Lantern titles (until they quit writing them with issue #40), Paul Levitz' Legion of Super-Heroes (until it got cancelled), and Grant Morrison's Batman Incorporated (until that ended, too). For a while I read Justice League Dark, Charles Soule's Swamp Thing, Pandora, Phantom Stranger and Trinity of Sin, but they all got cancelled too. After DC Rebirth I tried a bunch of them, then settled down to reading just Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman and James Tynion IV's Detective Comics, but Rucka left WW with #25, so I'm down to just the one DC Universe title. I did read The Death of Hawkman miniseries and liked it, so I bought the TP. I do read a few other non-DCU titles like Astro City, Batman '66, Wonder Woman '77, Future Quest, Scooby-Doo Team-Up, and Looney Tunes (just started actually). The latter five are floppies I actually buy (even though I'll also get the trade collections of Astro City, Batman '66, Future Quest and Scooby-Doo Team-Up). Future Quest is concluded now and I think that Batman '66 is ending with next week's LSH team-up one-shot.

That's a huge drop from six or seven years ago, though. Fortunately it leaves me more time and money to read comics from other publishers!

Last week I caught up on the last couple of X-Men movies (Days of Future Past and Apocalypse) that I hadn't seen on video, and re-watched Deadpool (it might be my favorite movie based on a Marvel or DC superhero comic, excepting maybe Watchmen and V for Vendetta). Then I watched the two Ghost Rider movies (the first isn't too bad, the second was terrible).

Yesterday I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes (for the first time since I saw it in the theater). Today I'll be reading the comic book prequel miniseries to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and watching the movie (which I also saw in the theater when it came out). Just wanted to refresh my memory of the first two films because I plan on seeing War for the Planet of the Apes sometime in the next few days. This is probably my favorite movie franchise reboot, in many ways superior to the original film series (of which I am a fan as well).

Quote from: rusty on July 12, 2017, 09:24:05 PM
Finding time to read all of this is the biggest problem.  I may eventually cut back, but figure there will be time to read everything when I retire if necessary.

That IS the problem. If you don't read them "hot off the press" the week they're released, I'm forced to wonder what's the point of accumulating floppy comics. I constantly see 90% of the floppy comics I bought just a few years ago when rifling through the 50 cent bins. Oh, they're still worth reading if you're interested in them, but it does beg the question of the reason people are collecting comic books in that format -- other than the weight of 50+ years of comic book readers for whom there was essentially no other choice available. Since we now are living in a time when we're disabused of the notion that collecting new comic books is an "investment", aren't we really only saving them so we can re-read the stories we particularly liked again later? In the meantime, there's vast amounts of energy to be expended on tracking titles and issues to be checked off lists, bagging/boarding, boxing and filing all those floppy comics. And they're so easily damaged by careless handling or storage when not protected by plastic and cardboard collecting supplies. I'm just lazy and I'm trying to cut down on the amount of effort I have to put into the collecting part of my library of comics. These days when I buy a floppy I'm probably buying it as much for the cover art as anything else, as I can always get the story at a later time in paperback or hardcover (or digitally, if that's what I preferred). Sometimes if it's a marginal-selling title I'll buy it just as a show of support for something I really like. Otherwise it's probably a title from one of those small publishers for whom a trade collection isn't guaranteed.

Nowadays comic books from all but the most marginal of publishers are virtually guaranteed to be available either as digital singles, or as trade paperbacks (usually both). So if you're not going to read them first, while they're still fresh, you might as well wait for the trade collection. Most of the current floppy comics I read now are just borrowed (usually on the day they're released, and returned in the same condition I got them within a week, if not the next day). The owner of my LCS is a personal friend.

Less than half of those floppy comics that I read I deem worthy of buying the trade collections of, but between recent stories and older material, I still manage to buy an average of 6 paperback or hardcover comics collections every week. I do have a particular weakness for Archives, Masterworks, Omnibus, Absolute, and other similar deluxe format comics (particularly comics from the 1930s through 1960s), as well as for hardcover newspaper strip collections from IDW's Library of American Comics and Hermes Press. Those hardcover collections tend to appear less frequently on my reading list, because they can sometimes sit for a long time before I get around to reading them. My priority is to read those borrowed floppy comics and return them quickly. Also, it can sometimes take me a long time (depending on how many comics are reprinted in a hardcover collection) to get through them, because I usually have a few different collected editions going at any one time that I sometimes put down for a little while, then read something else, then come back to it later -- sometimes much later. Depends on the nature of what's collected in the book and the overall length, unless it's one LONG story, then I usually try to read the whole thing contiguously. I guess that's one good thing about floppies, you can squeeze in a quick read of the whole comic when you don't have time to sit and read the whole of something lengthier that has 100-500 pages.

It seems to me that if there is a problem getting out issues of Jughead: The Hunger on a timely basis, then they should not even start publishing it. There should be no excuses, since the writer and artists have proven they can turn out pages on a normal deadline schedule.

If there turns out to be any holdup in putting out regular issues, you'll know that the logjam is a result of "no cash flow".

Quote from: rusty on July 12, 2017, 03:31:59 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 12, 2017, 10:16:57 AM
I sometimes wonder if Image isn't actually publishing more titles than DC. Most of them don't come out nearly as often, but they do publish a heck of a lot of titles.

I buy more comics from Image than I do from Marvel.  I think that DC and Marvel publish more titles, but Image does have quite a few.


Today (and maybe tomorrow)


Moonshine
No Mercy
Paper Girls
Reborn
Saga
Shutter
Wicked + Divine
Horizon
Eclipse
The Fix
Green Valley
Southern Cross
Switch

I read about the same percentage of the titles Image publishes as I do Marvel and DC's... maybe about 05% of what they're publishing. That's probably true of most of the larger publishers. I think I might read a slightly better percentage of Dark Horse, IDW, Boom, and Oni Press titles, and probably a significantly higher percent of Dynamite titles. Hard to say with Archie, because things keep shifting in the titles being published. I read 6 digests, most classic Archie trade collections (except for the Giant Comics and 1000-pagers), and was reading Jughead until it was cancelled. I'll be reading Your Pal Archie when that comes out.

I'd say the hardest thing with most Image titles is trying to get some idea of what the book's about, just by skimming through one. Frequently the art isn't doing anything to pique my interest, and the covers rarely even attract me to pick one up and flip through it. The ones I've liked I've generally just discovered by accident. Oh, I could easily discover those things about various titles if I wanted to do the work in checking up on each title Image puts out, looking at reviews and so forth, but it's just more effort than I want to make. Many's the first issue I've read that just didn't grab me, so it's got to stand out in some way to get my attention. Then again even if I do make it past the first to a second, third and fourth issue, those titles tend to fall by the wayside pretty easily if something more interesting comes out to get my attention. Most Image titles I wind up reading don't have long runs anyway.

I honestly rarely even pay that much attention to what company is publishing the comic, although I might be more likely to try an otherwise unknown title from Dark Horse or IDW, simply because those companies have proven to be more sympatico with my tastes in the past. I'm more likely to be attracted by specific creators, a novel concept, a predisposition to genre or subject matter, or just artwork I like by a previously-unknown-to-me creator.

More and more my attention focuses on the really smaller publishers, and trade paperbacks or hardcovers, whether original or reprinting stuff recent or older.

The thing I don't like about Marguerite Bennett's writing is it's a chore to read, not an enjoyment. You can write these comics at a more adult level without quadrupling the word count (the writers get paid by the page, not by the word). It just makes the story a tough slog to get through, when it should be light, breezy, and fun. Trying to cram so much dialogue in, and off-on-a-tangent references by the fistful, does not serve the story. Those would be all right if she knew when to choose her shots, but she just crams them in on every page. The thing the new writers need to learn from the old writers is economy, and pacing -- keep the story moving. Bennett's words try to hog all the attention, when she should be letting the artist do the job of carrying the story from panel to panel.

Apart from that, I felt her reboot characterizations were a little whack. Those aren't really the characters I know.

I would buy a book about The Archies drawn by Audrey Mok. But only if it were well-written and funny.

I sometimes wonder if Image isn't actually publishing more titles than DC. Most of them don't come out nearly as often, but they do publish a heck of a lot of titles.

Quote from: terrence12 on July 12, 2017, 12:30:39 AM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 11, 2017, 08:40:40 PM

Quote from: Vegan Jughead on July 11, 2017, 02:17:49 PM
I have no idea but since Jughead: The Hunger will be drawn by Pat and Tim Kennedy instead of Hack or Francavilla, it has a decent shot at actually sticking to a regular publishing schedule.

As long as it isn't written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. That probably has more to do with the 2-issues a year releases of AWA and ChAoS than Hack and Francavilla.

Which in other words bimonthly

Bi-monthly is every 2 months, terrence. Not even close. Twice a year is bi-annually. But that would be if either of those two titles came out twice a year. Last I checked, it was more like both AWA and ChAoS were coming out ONCE a year. What I really meant was that together, there are only about 2 issues of Archie Horror titles released every year -- one issue of AWA, and one of ChAoS.

WEEK OF 07-12-17:
BIG BANG UNIVERSE #2 & 3
UNCLE SCROOGE #432
RICK & MORTY: POCKET LIKE YOU STOLE IT #1 (of 5)
KILL OR BE KILLED #10
X-MEN BLUE #7
DETECTIVE COMICS #960
DARK DAYS: THE CASTING #1 (one-shot)
GREEN LANTERN/PLANET OF THE APES #6 (of 6)
BUG: THE ADVENTURES OF FORAGER #2 (of 6)
GREEN HORNET '66 MEETS THE SPIRIT #1 (of 5)
DOC SAVAGE: THE RING OF FIRE #4 (of 4)
JUSTICE INC: FACES OF JUSTICE #1 (of 4)
KISS/VAMPIRELLA #2 (of 5)
GWAR: ORGASMAGEDDON #2 (of 4)
MIGHTY MOUSE #2
GUMBY #1
MICRONAUTS: WRATH OF KARZA #3 (of 5)
ZOMBIES ASSEMBLE #0