The Gaming Den

I was at a bookstore the other day and noticed a copy of Archie on the shelf among the regular comic books. It was small, I think 6x4 or something to that effect, but had like 160 pages with virtually no adverts; and what few there were were for itself. It was full color, but in the classic four-color format, and printed on newsprint. The amazing part was the price, $3.99, equal to all of the other comic books on the shelves. However, regular comics have like 32 pages and a third of the pages are just ads.

As comic-for-your-buck goes, it's freakin' astounding. Does the simpler art form and paper quality really make that much of a difference? I'm bloody impressed. And to top it off, from what I can tell, Archie's comic sales seem to be on par with mainstream comics' top sellers.

What made all of the other comic book producers decide to abandon the format? One of the major reasons I never got into buying comics was because for the price of a paperback book, I got a maybe half an episode worth of story (if I was lucky, most seem to be 1 of 7 or something), with commercials.

Well if you go by a global standard, Archie Comics is closer to the kinds of anthologies popular throughout East Asia.


Why aren't superhero types like that? Well they've always been printed at a larger size.

The collectivity culture (that ruined the 90's) may also be a part of it, reprints in anthologies make the original feel less rare.

OgreBattle wrote:Why aren't superhero types like that? Well they've always been printed at a larger size.

Well, no. Comics companies have experimented with a vast assortment of sizes over the years - Marvel and other companies even did mass market paperback sized color reprints of some stuff back in the 70s, just like the old Peanuts and other comic strip books used to.

The decline of the digest has to do a lot with marketing and appeal. Disney comics & Archie are all-ages stuff, fairly self-contained, with very strict company style art standards for the most part (which is why Carl Barks was "the Good Duck Artist") and are stocked in supermarkets (and, when we had newsstands, newsstands). Comic books tend to be much more diverse, and have seen much less distribution from general retail publishers as opposed to specialty shops over the last couple decades.

I haven't bought comics for a lil while, but when I have, it is usually the compilation paperbacks like Whedon's X-Men run which came bundled in 4 such paperbacks. I had the first Phoenix storyline from back in the day in a big honkin color reprint book. I like having a full story contained in the comic and have generally avoided comics due to price and limited amount of story per issue.

One of the few comics that I think rocked the genre as single-issue rags were Groo comics. Those generally had self-contained short stories that could be encapsulated into a single issue and also sometimes had fun games of finding the hidden message as well. I remember my dad who started my brother and I on comics also read them and would hunt for the messages with a passion (some were crazy difficult).

Groo would make a great transition to e-comic books, but I know they're having a hard time with that what with having published under a half-dozen companies over the years.