Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art, and business, of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:28] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of comic books, my friend

[00:38] John Barber: John Barber. Is that because you think I oppose redistricting?

[00:42] David: No, because you're a heavyweight in the comic book industry, John.

[00:44] John: Okay. I'm trying to do better.

[00:45] David: I'm talking about professionally. You carry a lot of weight in this industry. Your word means a lot, to a lot of people.

[00:54] John: Oh, boy. Well, glad to be here.

[00:57] David: Yeah, me, too. Welcome. How's your week going? How’ve you been?

[01:00] John: It's not going on right now, because it would be funny to say this, but this whole week, there's been relentless jackhammering outside of my window here, because there's a big city project of them redoing all these gas pipes, and stuff. So, periodically, the water will go off, or whatever—electricity will have problems, but the amazing thing—Zoom filters out that jackhammer. I'll be sitting here on meetings—yesterday, somebody started to say something about some noise. Turned out, he was talking about his cat playing with him, which Zoom also wasn't picking up, but I thought he was complaining about the jackhammering, but as every other time, no one could hear it. I could barely hear them, but nobody could hear the jackhammer.

[01:42] David: Yeah. I feel like you were complaining about that the other day, when I was talking to you. Maybe it was on the podcast. I heard nothing. That's pretty amazing that the sound filters are so sophisticated, because that's got to just be an algorithm, right? That's not your microphone doing that. That's Zoom itself doing that.

[01:58] John: The reason I bring it up is because I think it's been going on forever, and I think it's going to continue going on to forever in the other direction. It turns out, they only had half of the amulet. So, they're digging in the wrong place.

[02:14] David: Yeah. I hate snakes.

[02:17] John: Yeah. How are you doing?

[02:19] David: Good, John. It's been a busy week. I've been making comics. We're putting the finishing touches on two different books at the same time. Well, we just wrapped up Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians Book #2. Got it to the printer. Our mutual friend, Jonathan Maberry, the 5-time Bram Stoker award-winning author, Jonathan Maberry, New York Times Bestselling Author, Jonathan Maberry, as he states in every e-mail that he sends. No, it's just his signature. It's not like “Do you know who I am?” He's not like that. Anyway, Jonathan Maberry wrote a prose piece for the back of the second book, did a great little 5000-word prose piece, took up about 8-10 pages at the end of the book, and it turned out so well, and it went a little longer than I thought it was going to go, and I was like, “man, this is a beautiful prose piece. I can't just leave it sitting in the back, just not accompanied.” So, then I had to go out and get 6 different spot illustrations done for it. I picked up this really cool artist to do some spot illustrations, and then had to reconfigure the whole book. So, the last several weeks have been—I thought I was going to print 3 weeks ago, and now I've just gone to print, 3 weeks later. You think, “I’m just going to do that one little thing. It's just going to be a week,” and then it turns into 3 weeks, because of course, it does, and now I'm off schedule, but I'm hoping that at the end of the day, no one's going to care that they had to wait 3 more weeks. I'm hoping they're going to care more about the fact that they got a really cool package that's bigger than they expected, and also has more cool stuff in it than I promised them, and on top of that, we're working on Sugar Bomb.

[03:54] John: Speaking of bigger than you expected—her breasts.

[04:00] David: Her boobs. She’s got big boobs. There's a reason for it, though. You will find out in the story, at some point, why, but we don't touch on that in the first book. We just wrapped that up. We just gave it to your 3D guy.

[04:14] John: Awesome. All right.

[04:16] David: He's in the process of turning it into a 3D comic book. So, we're going to have a Regular Edition, we're going to have a black and white—we're calling it the JuanJo Edition, because Juan Jose Ryp—it's the Artist Edition version of the book, and then we're going to have a 3D version of the book. I just got the quotes for the 3D glasses. So, we're going to do those. Thanks, once again, for helping me get that contact. I'm more excited for that 3D version than almost anything else. It's going to be so stupid. Can't wait.

[04:43] John: That's awesome.

[04:45] David: So, that's been my week. It's been busy.

[04:47] John: Me too, but nothing so exciting. I did have a chance to read at least one of those comics, and enjoyed it. So, looking forward to the actual […]. That's pretty cool. I can't wait for the 3D.

[04:56] David: I'm glad it landed with you. I'm really excited about this one. I don't know. It feels like everybody's giving it an A effort, and I can't ask for more, and I think the people that get it, they're going to be in for a treat. Juan Jose Ryp drew the hell out of this thing, man. It's so good.

[05:17] John: You keep talking about how this is the stupidest thing you've ever worked on, and all this stuff, and I mean, part of the thing that’s funny about it is just that it seems like everybody on there is giving 1000% to make this thing just genuinely good. It isn't a—I don't know—I feel like a lot of those things, the joke—I don't know—gets lost because it isn't very good, but this is all A+ level art.

[05:45] David: That makes it funny, to me.

[05:47] John: It isn't like “maybe those guys could draw an issue of Wolverine.” They have, and then secondly, if they drew an issue of Wolverine that looked like this, you'd be like, “oh, man, this is a really good-looking issue of Wolverine.”

[05:59] David: The final letter copy, I showed it to Juan Jose Ryp, the artist, and his e-mail was just exclamation marks. He's super happy with it. He really loved it. So, I'm feeling good about our launch, and I think people are going to really dig this one. So, yeah. That's what I've been up to—Oh, and another thing. I think I've mentioned it. I'm sure I have. Chase and I handle all the archiving of all things Conan. So, any comic book or comic book magazine in the history of Conan the Barbarian, Chase and I are responsible now for basically archiving that material, and creating whatever new print versions of that material that's going to come out. It's a very big responsibility. Chase and I are very proud to be working on this stuff. It is a lot of work, but we just fell into a gold mine the other day. We discovered that there's a series of miniseries in the mid-to-late 90s—from ‘96 to 2000—They tried to relaunch Conan. I think it was called Conan the Savage. Chuck Dixon wrote it, and there was a couple of different artists on it, and then that ran for 10/11/12 issues, and then they did a series of mini-series, and I think Chuck wrote a lot of those, as well, but with different artists on them. So, those little series of 3-issue miniseries were running from ‘96 to about 2000, and those have never been collected, and they're not anywhere to be found, but we found them. We found the original files, and they're all in a format that's, I don't know, LZX, or something like that. Guess what program is the only program that can open these files properly, John. Guess.

[07:40] John: Well, it's going to be QuarkXPress, and it's going to open each individual piece of the file, randomly, somewhere between 99 and 100% of the actual size.

[07:52] David: You’ve got it. You have done this before.

[07:55] John: I have.

[07:57] David: So, we have all these. We can't even open the files. I don't have Quark, but thankfully, we found a guy who does exactly this for Marvel.

[08:07] John: I was going to say, how's Robbie? He liked Quark. That was the joke. That was 100% of the joke there. Sorry.

[08:15] David: We found a gentleman who’s able to convert files, does it super fast, and very reasonable price. So, we're getting all that done. So, that was another thing that happened this week that's taking up a lot of time, but very exciting. Very exciting to have the original digital files of that stuff, because as you well know, if you can get those files, boy, preservation and reissuing of that stuff is so much simpler.

[08:38] John: Oh, yeah. It was a Wild West in those days. You can go through any of the paperbacks from that era, and there'll always be a couple of pages that are scanned out of the comic, or a whole issue that they don't have, that they had to scan.

[08:51] David: I mean, we're still having to do that now. I'm literally scanning Savage Sword of Conan #172, the whole book. It just doesn't exist. I mean, at some point, it did, and somebody might have it somewhere, but we can't get them. So, yeah, it's still happening today.

[09:08] John: Did I ever tell the story of the Elektra Movie Adaptation, and the black and white story that we put in there?

[09:14] David: No.

[09:15] John: Yeah, I won't even go into the rest. This cursed comic that I worked on. Part of it was, we were doing this—not a Deluxe version—a thick, regular comic book version of it. That had some bonus features, and some reprints, and one of them was going to be the—I think, at that point, hadn't been reprinted—issue of Bizarre Adventures, or something, that had a 6-page black and white Elektra story by Frank Miller. That was going to be pretty neat. You haven't seen that for a long time. Most people probably […]. So, I'm talking to Ralph Macchio, who I was working with at the time, and he says, “and not only has it never been reprinted. I was the editor on that, originally, and we printed the pages out of order. So, if you go and you read this thing, you think there's some weird avant-garde storytelling going on, part of it, but two of the pages are just flipped. So, this will be the first time it's ever been printed in the correct order.” Turns out, the film for that exists, and it had been scanned. So, we get it all placed, production puts it in there, they give me a print out of the issue, and it's missing 1/3, vertically, of one page. 1/3 of one page’s film doesn't exist. So, we had to go in and take a copy of the magazine, scan in that 1/3, and then align it with the rest of the art, so that it’d the best version of it you could have.

[10:34] David: […] 2/3 of the original scans?

[10:38] John: Yeah.

[10:39] David: That’s funny. Did it work? Were you able to match it up?

[10:42] John: Yeah, it works okay. […] I'm pretty sure—now, I think it's available a bunch of places, and I'm pretty sure they're using the same files that we put together. Maybe they managed to find the—well, no, I think, straight up, the film got cut. So, I just think that they didn't have it.

[11:01] David: Yeah, man.

[11:02] John: Yeah. If somebody didn't tell you to go and look for it, you'd never know.

[11:06] David: Right. Sure. It is fascinating, diving into this, and I know you have experience with this, too, and maybe we've talked about it before. I feel like I'm saying that a lot lately. We've been doing this for a while, John. We’re about to start Season 3 very soon. We’ve got to get our act together, which, by the way, you've got to write that.

[11:24] John: Hounds to the Slaughter is what we should call it. That's the first issue of Conan the Savage #1.

[11:30] David: Yeah. Oh, what was I saying? Oh, yeah—it's really fascinating to be working on these historical projects, because it's so hard not to insert yourself into the piece, because there's so many decisions to be made. We had this weird thing where Conan is just this really strange red in a single issue of Conan the King. He's red in several of Conan the King. For some reason, they decided he was red, but he's way crazy chartreuse weird red, in this particular issue, and I can't tell if that's a printer error, but the files look that way. So, we have to scan that, and then we have to recolor it. Do we preserve that error for historical sake, or do we fix it, and does it even need to be fixed? That's just one of a million tiny little decisions that keep happening on every single page of these books. It's so hard to make the right call, sometimes. Thank god, I'm not a nuclear physicist, or something, because I can't handle the stress, John.

[12:38] John: Yeah. It’s funny. That stuff, in general—I was packaging up some X-Force issues—after I left Marvel, before I was at IDW, I was putting together some of the—I forget what the editions were called—the books of the X-Force stuff, and you could tell how late the issues were running, because the color separations kept getting worse, as the series went on. I fixed some of that stuff. There were a couple of panels—nobody, at the time, meant for this to happen. This is one where it wasn't being recolored. The scans of the film were good enough to use to reprint. There was a big—what do you call it?—remastering of the James Bond movies, decades ago now—15 years ago, or something—and one of the behind-the-scenes features, they were talking about the different things that they were doing, and not doing, in it, where there's one sequence in a Roger Moore film, where the camera was timed wrong with the fluorescent lighting, in an actual location that they were filming on. So, in the original movie, the light’s flickering, and you can do that with your own camera if you catch, especially, fluorescent light. If you catch it wrong, the frequency of the light can match up with the frequency of the frames per second you're shooting at. So, they went back in color-timed that. So, it all stayed the same color. So, that scene now looks the way they thought they were filming it, when they filmed it.

Then there's another—I think it was the first George Lazenby scene. The time-of-day changes dramatically, from shot to shot, because they were shooting on a beach, or something, and again, they went in and color-timed that. So, it was, consistently, the sun was setting, throughout the scene, but there's another scene, in one of the movies, where you can see the cameraman in a mirror, when James Bond punches a guy into a mirror, and I think they kept that one in. They decided, that was a fun thing that the fans knew about, and liked, and they'd miss it, if it was gone. It's funny when you think about that. Even people going back and saying how they want to have the original version of Star Wars play. I mean, I would love to see that. If the original version of Star Wars was released in theaters, I'd go see it, absolutely, but there is no original version of it, because the stereo and mono mixes of that have different dialogue, in parts. Those were released simultaneously. Most theaters didn't have stereo sound, at that point, but it’s George Lucas. So, of course, he's going to make his movie with stereo sound, but some of the background, the things people call out—not the main dialogue, but stuff in that background—it’s mixed differently, and some stuff appears in one version, but not in the other. All those things have to be decisions you'd make if you were doing something. […] it’s just a simple thing, until you get into it.

[15:02] David: Exactly. Our mantra is “do no harm.” That's the guiding principle is, “do no harm.” I like to think that we're doing a pretty good job. I know that we're very competent at what we're doing. Chase and I are both very good at this stuff, but on top of that, we both have a respect and reverence for the material, and I think really that's probably the most important thing, and I know that we both have that. Man, I'm looking at this. Sometimes, looking at this Conan stuff, there's always a dud, here and there, but man, the consistency of the quality of the work, for a very long period of time—Just top-notch, high quality stuff, and there's a reason why Conan is still being talked about in comic books today, because the stuff that's being produced right now, it's fantastic. Jim Zub’s just crushing it with the book. Also, there's just a long history of quality work there, and it's really a joy to be working on that stuff. Speaking of long histories, John.

[15:59] John: Yes. I have been around on this planet for nearly 50 years. There's one thing  you know about me, I go to grocery stores, sometimes as many as 4 times a day, because of nonsense with my family, and people forgetting things that they need, or me forgetting things that I needed to get, or whatever, and every time I've gone into that grocery store, I've made a particular decision to not buy any Archie Digests—until about two weeks ago, and I go into the grocery store, I was walking by the magazine section, which, if you've been to a grocery store, especially if you've been to it, both now and in the past, you'll know that the magazine section in the grocery store has never been smaller. That's not the thing it used to be. You used to have all sorts of stuff there, but I go to the little magazine section, and I see the Archie Digest there, and I'm like “Huh,” and I flip through, and one of them was The Archie Halfway to Halloween issue, and I'm like, “man, I like Halloween stuff. Maybe this is my entry point into Archie.” I buy it. I’m sitting there, reading it, and my son sees me reading it. He's like, “what's that?” and I’m like, “Archie Halloween,” and he's like, “can we read it?” “Yeah, I guess so. Sure.”

So, I stopped reading it myself, and I read it with my six-year-old son, and we finished that, and we moved on. We read something else, and then he's really into these Akedo Warrior figures—Little plastic figures. They’re like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, but smaller, and collectible. He was like, “I wish there was a comic of that,” and I was like, “well, Dragon Ball Z isn't a million miles away from that. He'd like that.” So, I pull out a copy of Dragon Ball Z Volume 1. We're reading that, and he's pretty into it. It seems like exactly the thing he wants—just these guys fighting, and stuff. I can't remember […]. I got another Archie Digest, and I was like, “let's stop reading Dragon Ball Z, and read this new Archie Digest, and then go back to Dragon Ball Z later.” So, he gets really into it, and then I find out, as I'm mentioning this to the people at work, Archie has discontinued the Digests. The month I decide to start buying them, they cancel them.

[18:06] David: Dammit, John. You're the reason.

[18:09] John: Yeah, it was—I don't know. I mean, was it a trap, for me, or something?

[18:15] David: “We got that John Barber. We can finally rest.”

[18:18] John: There's a couple things that all came together for me on this. One, it’s interesting, because that was the last newsstand comic, basically. I mean, maybe there's something I'm not really thinking of, and there's the stuff like Heavy Metal that’s magazine-y. The Archie stuff seems like what I think of as a traditional newsstand comic, that was what you grew up having access to, and that was what I started reading comics on, and everything, and it's interesting to see how that goes away. Also, interesting—Maybe the opposite of interesting—to see the commentary about that, because there's a lot of nonsense people are saying, and just nobody under the age of 30 is like, “Oh, man. Getting rid of newsstand comics is going to hurt the discoverability of comics.”

[19:01] David: Yeah, but I do think there is something to that. I don't want to outsize the preciousness of that, or what that's actually accomplishing, but I do think there is something there.

[19:15] John: Yeah, no, I think so, too. I do want to talk about that, but the other big thing, for me, is just business-stuff aside—Here I am, a guy in my late 40s, reading Archie for the first time. Obviously, I know who the characters are. There's Archie stuff I've read. I’ve read Afterlife with Archie, and I've read some of the other horror stuff, and I’ve read when Mark Waid and Fiona Staples were doing it. I’ve read Archie stuff, here and there, but in IDW, we published a bunch of Archie reprint books, and I never really had any interest in those, and I watched the Riverdale TV Show, of course, or at least for a little bit. Although, that was the show that killed me watching TV, because it was 1 show too many for me to be able to handle.

[19:55] David: Really? That was the straw that broke the camel's back?

[19:57] John: If you remember that time, it was the height of the Berlantiverse of the DC shows. So, I've gotten into those, and Berlanti is the producer on Riverdale. So, it was one more of those, and then that was at the same time, I think, Black Lightning came out, and there was another show that launched. Supergirl was launching then, too. So, it was all at the same time. I’m just like, “this is too much for me to handle.”

[20:23] David: So, what you're saying is that, once they brought in a person of color and a woman into the shows, you're like, “I'm out. I'm done with this.”

[20:30] John: Archie’s a guy. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, you're right. There you go. That gets me back for all the stuff I was saying about you. So, yes. Fair enough. If I remember right, you did read Archie, as a kid. Is that right?

[20:46] David: Yeah. My memory is a little fuzzy, because I'm old, too. I was reading Hot Stuff and Casper, and Archie, and Richie Rich. I was reading a bunch of those, but it was just random. If I saw it on the stand, and my mom would buy it for me, I'd get it, and I'd read it. So, it didn't matter. It could have been Archie. It could have been a Casper. It could have been whatever it was. If it was available, and I could somehow wrangle somebody to get it for me, I was reading that. I was getting it. The flip hadn't switched. There's something where you turn from a casual reader to “Now, I'm a fan. I'm into this. This is my jam.” From “Oh, yeah. That's fine, if it's available. I don't have anything else to do. I'll read a Casper comic book. Cool,” but I'm not taking care of them or keeping them somewhere. I'm just reading them and throwing them away, or whatever. I don't even know what happened to them. So, that flip hadn't switched with any of the Archie stuff. It took Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, and I think shortly thereafter, Groo the Wanderer—once those two things clicked in my head, then it was GI Joe and Transformers, and all the other stuff that was coming with that. I'd go in deep, and started really paying attention, but Archie was definitely a mainstay in my house. I always had Archie comic books laying around, and was totally into them—Not as much as I was into Casper and Hot Stuff, and Richie Rich, and things like that, but I think it's just because of the age that I was reading that stuff. I was really young. So, the younger-skewing stuff was just appealing to me more, and the Archie stuff was young also, but I hadn't quite aged into the Archie stuff yet, and by the time I had aged into the Archie stuff, I was already off into full comicdom—Marvel, DC, and that stuff.

[22:40] John: I have a feeling that's a lot of people's experience with Archie—that when it was at its height, it was probably a thing a lot of people were casually into, not that they were going to make a lifestyle out of It, and I know there are counterexamples, because I work with 6 people at the company I'm at, and I think two of them have either literal subscriptions to the Archie Digests, or have every copy in their garage.

[23:04] David: Oh, really? That's fascinating.

[23:07] John: Yeah, it is. Chris Ryall's one of them.

[23:09] David: Really? I didn't know Chris Ryall was an Archie guy.

[23:12] John: Yeah.

[23:13] David: Oh okay.

[23:14] John: A general everything guy. I had always had, in my head, that Archie was very vanilla, very middle-of-the-road, mainstream teen-but-for-kids stuff. It is. I mean, it's not like that's a completely wrong impression of it, but the experience of sitting down and reading one of these Digests, at my age, not knowing very much about this, was bonkers, because these Digests are a zillion pages long. They're real long. It's 200 pages.

[23:49] David: Yeah, 180+ pages.

[23:50] John: And they're just pulled from throughout Archie’s history—anywhere from the past 80 years, these stories could be coming in at, and just plopped in next to each other. There's probably more of a preponderance towards more recent stuff, but it’s still all over the place, and going through and reading this stuff—sometimes, they're pop stars that go on tour. Sometimes, they're not. Sometimes, there are vampires. Sometimes, there are haunted houses. Sometimes, there's an infinite number of haunted houses. Sometimes, they’re vampire hunters. Sometimes, they're scared of vampires, but it turns out there aren't really vampires. Sometimes, they’re superheroes. Sometimes, when they were kids, they were different superheroes. All this stuff is just all over the place. It isn’t like it's confusing. My six-year-old is reading this, and didn't have any problem with that, any more than he had a problem with wire Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd fighting in the Revolutionary War right now. Just what's happening in this one.

[24:50] David: The characters are consistent. The window dressing and everything around them can just be whatever. As long as the core of the characters are consistent, you're good to go, and in 80 years of publishing history, at a certain point, you're just going to be like […].

[25:05] John: It'd be the same thing, I think, if there was a Batman Digest like that, and I was reading that. Most of the same stuff I said—not the Rockstar stuff—but a lot of the other stuff would be completely the same thing. Sometimes, Batman fights vampires, and everybody knows there's vampires. Sometimes, there's no vampires in the Batman world, or are there? Sometimes, he is a vampire.

[25:25] David: Yeah, and then Kelley Jones comes in, and draws the hell out of it, John.

[25:29] John: Some of the stories, they we'll change the dates. So, they're set in the present day, even if that doesn't make any sense. So, there's one where they were clearly going to Woodstock ’95, or Woodstock ’99—Whatever—and they're talking about how their parents all went to Woodstock, but they've changed the date of this new festival, and it's not actually called Woodstock. It's these super lazy Archie names. It's adorable. They're going to go see Johnny Hundrox—or whatever. They're going to Woodstock ’99. Their parents all went to the original Woodstock. Their parents are in their 80s, if they went to the original Woodstock, and they're going to this show in 2025. That just doesn't add up. The logic of that isn't there. Another story just mentions that they’re in 2016, which I guess is when that story came out. Even that wasn't done consistently, but that just adds to the jarring weirdness of the thing. I don't know. I just became fascinated with it, and I started looking into where Archie came from, what the history of Archie is, and the other big piece of this puzzle—to not to spoil the ending of it—is they just announced that there's a new Archie movie, or they're trying to make a new Archie movie, that Lord and Miller are producing, and Tom King is writing.

[26:58] David: So random.

[26:59] John: Yeah. Even that was funny, because—also, since the last time we talked—I finally read Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which is wonderful. A really great Superman book, and if you came out of the Superman movie and wanted more Superman, I highly recommend that, even though he's not in it, but that's the basis of the Supergirl movie, apparently, and I think that helped him. I don't know.

[27:25] David: It’s on my super shortlist. Did I read the first issue? The very next thing I'm going to read is that. I'm really anxious to read it.

[27:34] John: Imagine that, but with Archie. No, I don't know.

[27:38] David: That's Into the Spider-Verse movie producers, right? That's a killer group. Yeah, those are legit folks.

[27:46] John: Yeah, and they did the Spider-Verse Lego movie, the 21 Jump Street movies, I guess, contractually, less than 37% of Solo, or—I don't know—whatever the number was that they weren't the directors of Solo, but they were the ones fired off of Solo. Then Ron Howard came in and finished it. Anyway, Archie started in September of 1939, with the Blue Ribbon Comics #1, featuring, I think, one of all of our favorite characters Rang-A-Tang the Wonder Dog, where would we be without Rang-A-Tang? Let's say, I guess, inspired by Rin Tin Tin. There's a Charles Biro comic in there about an infantry guy. Had some reprints of Little Nemo, but Issue #2 brought us our first Archie superhero, Bob Phantom.

[28:40] David: Rang-A-Tang the Wonder Dog and Bob Phantom?

[28:42] John: Yeah, and the trajectory was straight up from there, with those Saturn V rockets going “there's nowhere for you to go but the moon.” All joking aside, a couple of months later, in January of 1940, they launched Pep Comics, and Pep had The Shield as it’s head character, and that was the first patriotic superhero. That came out in January of 1940. Captain America wouldn't come out till December of 1940, both predating World War 2, with both the earlier ones. So, then in Issue #22 of Pep Comics is when they say, again, “inspired by the Andy Hardy movies that starred Mickey Rooney,” that were what made Mickey Rooney a star. He played a character named Andy Hardy, a series of films through the late 30s/40s, I think into the 50s. He was a young teenager. I mean, it was Archie. He was this fresh-faced teenager, and has troubles with girls, and […].

[29:43] David: And Mickey Rooney is starring as Andy Hardy. Okay, some of the titles include “Love Finds Andy Hardy,” “Life Begins for Andy Hardy,” “Judge Hardy and Son,” “Love Laughs at Andy Hardy,” “Andy Hardy's Double Life,” The Courtship of Andy Hardy.” A lot of teen romance, I think, is what we're looking at here.

[30:06] John: Yeah. There's 15 movies between 1937 and 1946, and then, 12 years later, they do a final sequel to it, or something, another movie in it, but with him intentionally older, at that point.

[30:21] David: So, Archie Comics absolutely did not rip off Andy Hardy movies—in no way, shape, or form.

[30:29] John: It's interesting. That was something I'm thinking of. Comics have a lot of cache now, a lot of cultural cachet, but it would’ve been disposable, for a real long time, and yet, there is no question as to “which one do you remember more?” Which one does America think more frequently about? Andy Hardy or Archie Andrews? It's not close. Even if it was a knockoff, everybody remembers the knockoff, and these were very popular movies, obviously. They made 16 of them, and I think, it's probably the sort of thing you would have seen on TV a lot—an era where that was just showing up on TV quite a bit, or almost a TV show, in itself, at that point. Archie themselves made it onto the TV in 1968 with a cartoon show, and this is another bizarre aspect of the Archie stuff, at least for me, as I'm trying to get my handle on this. Simultaneous with this TV show, they launched a pop band, inspired by The Monkees, The Archies. The Monkees had gotten into some trouble, they had gotten into arguments. So, the next band they wanted to make like that, they just wanted to have straight-up be cartoon characters. So, in the comics, they introduced The Archies as a band, and then The Archies, in real life, they released 5 albums between 1968 and 1971.

[31:51] David: 5 albums?

[31:52] John: Yes.

[31:53] David: Wow. I mean, there's a couple hits out of there, though.

[31:57] John: Sugar Sugar is […]. I was at my wife’s work’s annual summer picnic, and Sugar Sugar was playing, and I said to my son, “hey, listen. That's The Archies.” He's familiar with them, from the Digests.

[32:17] David: You’re raising him right, John.

[32:18] John: Strangely, the real-life releases of this had one massive hit, and several other, but pretty big hits, especially at the time, which is an interesting time to be—1968-1971. There's some good albums that came out there, that were not Sugar Sugar, but within the context of the Archie comic book, they are in a band called The Archies, and the characters play certain instruments. They're all session musicians, in real life. So, they can be replaced. It’s probably not the same guitarist on every album. Whatever. They wanted to not have it be The Monkees, where Mike Nesmith could all of a sudden have some opinions, or want to play something, or Davy Jones might want to see a solo career. So, in the comic, sometimes they'll be playing at the beach, they'll be just the high school band, and it'll make sense, and then other times, they'll be in England, and they'll be on tour, and everybody will be excited to meet The Archies, which just does not track with where everything else is, in the rest of the series, but all right. It's just like The Spy Who Loved Me, speaking of James Bond, like we were earlier.

The book, The Spy Who Loved Me, when Ian Fleming sold all the rights to make all the 007 movies, most of those movies did very little but keep the title of the book, and turn it into something else. Some of the early ones are very close, and then they get further and further away. The Spy Who Loved Me, specifically, all they could use was the title. They couldn't use the story of it. That was in the contract, because Spy Who Loves Me is written as a book written by the lady that James Bond meets on this adventure. So, you're reading a book that exists in the James Bond Universe, wherein James Bond is a famous spy, which again, doesn't make sense with anything around it, and that's what Archie stuff reminds me of. It doesn't make sense in the stories, on either side of it, but there you go. So, even more funny, in 1968, early-on in this, before Sugar Sugar, I think, they released a song called Feeling So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.). Scooby-Doo’s spelled slightly different than the character, who had not appeared yet—who did not exist, but Filmation was making the Archie Show. Hanna-Barbera had the request to make a show like the Archies, where a group of musicians travel around, and get on adventures, and lo and behold, Scooby-Doo came out of that, and the official line is that they got that from Frank Sinatra saying “Scooby-doo-doo,” but some people point to the song called S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O., […] that they were directly requested to--

[35:02] David: Yeah, that seems a little more of a direct line. Wow, that's cool. I didn't know that.

[35:07] John: Yeah. Also, kind of fun—Sugar Sugar was on the cassette tape that Alan Bean brought with him on Apollo 12. They had one tape of music that they flew to the moon and back with, and Sugar Sugar was on it.

[35:21] David: Was it a mixtape?

[35:22] John: Apparently so. Yeah.

[35:24] David: Fantastic.

[35:25] John: It's real-life NASA technology coming home to you later on.

[35:28] David: There were no cassette tapes until the 80s, right? Doing it way before then. That's why we invest in our future, John.

[35:39] John: That's right. Velcro, also. You know what my son would be doing without Archie, because I assume then they wouldn’t have a space program? His shoes would be falling off right now, he would have no Tang, and he wouldn't know about The Archies or Josie and the Pussycats, or whatever. Josie and the Pussycats is a spin-off, and that came out the next year. There were a couple more cartoons in the 70s, some live-action stuff in the 70s. I think in the 80s, there was a cartoon, in the 90s, there was a cartoon, but the biggest thing I think that happened to Archie in the 90s was the TV show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which is another spin-off, because in the neighboring town, there's just straight-up magic, and Sabrina lives there, and she knows, I guess, them, but they don't always interact, and she has her own adventures, and her own comics, and stuff. So, that show went on forever. There was just quite a history to get up to the point where I was even vaguely aware of this stuff. I never watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I don't know--

[36:34] David: Yeah, me neither. Not my jam.

[36:36] John: Anything about that. […]. Yeah, I was too old for it in 1996, and didn't have anything that ever drove me back to it. The time that I really got interested in Archie, in any way, before was the Riverdale TV Show, which was a show run by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who used to be my neighbor up in New York.

[36:57] David: What? Really?

[36:58] John: Yeah. Not next-door neighbor, or something. We lived in the same area. So, he’d invite me to his plays, and stuff, and he was a pretty cool guy. The last time we saw each other, we said hi. It was all good. His whole background was that the first play that he ever wrote—he started off as a playwright before writing Fantastic Four and a bunch of other comics, doing the rewrite on the Spider-Man musical when they revamped that, mid-run—His first play was a parody of Archie, where all the Archie characters were adults, and they were gay, and he himself was gay. That was coming from that point of view.

[37:30] David: Oh, okay. It makes a little more sense.

[37:32] John: They got a cease-and-desist letter, but they produced it anyway. They just changed the characters’ names. I guess, originally, they were actually going to call them Archie, and Reggie, and everything. Then later on, he becomes Editor-in-Chief of Archie, and show-runs their big hit show. So, it was really funny to see that show happen, because that was clearly the thing he always wanted to do. He was genuinely into the Archie characters.

[37:56] David: Right. Big fan.

[37:58] John: And into pushing them into different directions. Riverdale is more of a Twin Peaks kind of thing. I didn't finish watching it, because like I said, it broke the camel's back with me being able to watch TV shows with any regularity, I guess. I don't know, but I know it got really weird, and time travel, and magic, and stuff started happening in it, but now that I've read this Archie stuff, that's not weird, at all. That's exactly what happens in Archie. It seems like a one-to-one case on this. I don't know if it's really weird, or if it's just my not knowing about it, and everything seems weird when you don't know about it, and it doesn't seem weird when you do. I've found it extremely interesting to come in fairly cold on something, in a way that there aren't a lot of opportunities for me to do that in comics. I don't mean to say that I've read everything, but it's always exciting to find something new, and it isn't like when I was 10, and everything felt like that. I don't know. Seeing all this stuff, and thinking about it, and thinking about what went into those decisions that made things like that. I don't know, but also, I found it really entertaining. I mean, it wasn't like I was reading this and thinking that this is—any individual story is great. Qualitatively, Dragon Ball Z is much better than any of the Archie stories that I read, without question, but the amalgamation of those two Digests I bought, before they no longer had Digests, the 400 pages of […] that I read there, it opened up worlds, in a weird way, for me.

[39:29] David: Yeah, and it sounds like it did it for your son, too. It sounds like he was very much interested in what was happening there. Archie, famously, in my mind, seems to be—this is a horrible way to put it—where writers and artists go to die. There's so many guys who were around, producing at the highest levels, in the 90s. Tom DeFalco was Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, and he was writing all kinds of books there, before, during, and after. Responsible for a lot of really important stuff. The 2099 Universe—that’s his thing. He came up with that. Anyway, he's a very creative individual. The Death of Superman stuff. He was one of the major architects. After the Death, I think he was doing Superman Blue stuff. Wasn't it him and Ron Frenz on the Superman Blue stuff? He was a big part of the return of Superman. I think Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz were a big part of that, and then, he's been writing Archie comic books for 15 years, and no one knows. That is my point, and Steven Butler is still drawing comic books, in 2025. Who knew? He's regularly drawing Archie comics. That's the thing that he's still doing. It's fascinating.

[40:51] John: Also, one of the last places that was regularly lettering on the art boards. So, a lot of really good letterers that did that work there. So, you'd have these Archie or Sonic the Hedgehog issues, where Tom Orzechowski or John Workman, greatest letterers of all time, would just be lettering random issues of that. The impression I get, and I don't know that much about it—I didn't really go into any of the more contemporary history of the company—the company was founded by Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and Jon Goldwater. Goldwater was one of the founders of the Comic Magazine Association of America, AKA the Comics Code, also was a National Commissioner of the Anti-Defamation League, oddly enough. Didn't know, but he was the Editor-in-Chief, and his family became the owners of the company, and continue—I think, to this day, it is still some of the descendants of him, but tumultuous times there.

[41:47] David: Yeah, I think that's all done, or mostly done now, though. As these things go along, families get bigger, and then they'll start passing away, and you’ve got to deal with the issues of who actually owns this now. I think most of that's wrapped up, at this point. I will say that the current Editor-in-Chief over there, Mike Pellerito, is really rock-solid. That guy is a very smart individual, super smart guy, really nice, and I think he's done a fantastic job of navigating the dangerous waters of all the legal stuff that was happening, swirling around him, and really elevating the brand, in a way that it needed, and I think a lot of that work was coming from Mike, and his team there, too, but Mike’s Editor-in-Chief, he's the leader of the place, and I think that his ideas for things, like putting Mark Waid on the book to get a stronger direct-market distribution, and things like that, all that stuff really helped the brand, kept it viable, and growing in its viability, I think, over the last several years that his been on it.

[42:48] John: They have a lot of stuff in those Digests directing you toward the website to buy stuff, not just digital stuff, and a lot of stuff they have to buy is really nice. I don't mean to sound like I have the greatest taste in that kind of thing, but they were a quality-looking thing.

[43:02] David: You can tell that that business has been around a while. They're doing a lot of things right. They've got a quality organization over there, for the most part, it looks like. I went to the website today, because I knew we were going to be talking about Archie, and I went to the website today, and I was impressed by, it's easy to navigate. There's a really good Archie News section. It's just a well-laid-out, well-presented website, with great options for buying things, and easy to buy things. You said, John, that they've cancelled the Digest, but you do know that they've got another Digest coming, right?

[43:36] John: What’s that?

[43:37] David: They're ending the specific particular Digest that you bought, the 180-page giant thing. What they're doing is, they're reformatting the books to the same size as their crossword puzzles and games books. So, I think it's slightly closer, probably, to a magazine size, I'm guessing. I couldn't find any specs.

[43:57] John: It's in-between. It’s smaller than a comic book, but bigger than the Digest, or a manga.

[44:04] David: Oh, okay. So, they're moving things to that format. That makes sense to me, because I'm sure, if they can print that format, it's going to save them money over time, because it's just a format that they're already printing a bunch of stuff in, and they're dropping the page count from 180 pages to 96 pages. So, that's probably an actual savings. There's not usually a lot of savings in print cost, but that's probably a real savings there, cut it in half, and that price is staying the same—still $9.99. So, there's a little shrinkflation happening there, but the other thing that I was reading up on is that the reason they're cancelling the Digest line is because they're just trying to bring it more in-line to a holiday theme. The […] is going to be more of a holiday theme. So, the first one is going to be the Halloween Special, and then there'll be a Christmas Special, and so on, and so forth.

So, they've already announced 3 or 4 new non-Digest Digests, and they're not abandoning the newsstand distribution. It sounds like they're just trying to play with the format a little bit, maybe to get more in line with the size and specs of things that they're finding success in. I don't know which versions of the crossword puzzles and Sudoku puzzles that they're doing, or whatever it is, but those things do pretty well, I'm sure, still.

[45:21] John: That is a weird world, nowadays, of what is at grocery stores, and that's the thing that I saw some commentary about, from the gallery out there watching this. “$9.99 for this. Who's going to buy that?” I imagine anybody saying that has not bought a magazine at a grocery store in 15 years.

[45:39] David: They're not $4 anymore.

[45:42] John: From the beginning of comics until this, that's the balance that you're trying to strike with comics, of a low enough price point that somebody would buy it, but high enough that somebody would stock it, because that's always been the problem with comics, and that's why magazine prices went up between 1939 and 1960, but comic book prices didn't, and comic books just got smaller and smaller, and magazines didn't. That's always driven comics out of newsstands, not into consumers hands, because—not always—At a certain point, that started driving them out of the retailers that were doing that, because they could use that same shelf space to stock something that was going to make more money.

[46:23] David: Yeah, it's very weird. I don't know that typical comic book fans understand that. “We’ll make them cheaper, and then they'll be in more places.” No, actually, the reverse of that is probably more true, especially nowadays, and that's a weird thing to try to have to explain.

[46:41] John: Yeah. If you want to not publish comic books, the two best ways to not publish comic books are, #2, just don't publish comic books, #1, start publishing in the newsstands. That's always been a thing that has killed companies, or companies have survived their efforts to do that, because the returns kill you. It's not like book returns, where you can continue to sell the items that you get returned. They're just losses when you don't. Fraud's always been super easy on that side. The economics are real difficult to make work.

[47:15] David: Yeah. That system doesn't work in 2025, for comic books. Maybe it still works for—I don't think it works for most. When everyone was going to the newsstand, and buying newspapers and magazines, and that's how they were getting their information, and that’s how they’re getting their entertainment, you were selling hundreds of thousands of copies every single week. We all get our stuff off our phone now. There's no print destination. I feel like bookstores have settled into whatever the new normal is. We're not hearing about Barnes and Nobles closures every other week, like we used to, a few years back. It seems like things have stabilized, and maybe a little bit of a resurgence, but certainly, not to the level that Barnes and Noble was when we were youth. Man, there was a bookstore on every corner, practically. So, you just don't even have the non-newsstand distribution. The numbers are tighter, and you just can't make those mistakes, man. You can't afford to ship out 100,000 units and have 90,000 units come back. You can't afford to ship out a million units and have 300,000 come back. The economics are wildly different, but Archie’s still doing it. I think it must have something to the fact that they must be embedded with the mafia, because it's the only way I can think that they're holding on to all those slots in all these newsstands and grocery stores.

[48:34] John: They changed newsstand distributors in the last several years, and when you dig into what the newsstand distributors show—Heidi MacDonald was writing about it a little bit, on The Beat—it is not a world where every magazine thrives. It’s a world where things are very targeted, and the Archie stuff, especially, is not made for this specific thing that's coming out, if that makes sense. The Archie Digest is not 200 pages of new material. It's the opposite of that. It's 0 pages of new material. The only thing new in there is the ads for new comics and the website, but that's true of a lot of stuff you see at grocery stores now, where you see those—heading into Halloween season now. So, you're going to see those “50 Most Haunted Places in America” magazines, and they're the same ones they had last year, just a little different, but that market is much more prone to have stuff that's been repurposed from other places, or can be repurposed to other places, than it used to be. There's obviously a ton of exceptions, of just regular magazines that are still coming out, but it's a cascading effect. Also, when you were selling in newsstands, and if things went great, getting 30% or 40% returns on your magazine, you were making your money on advertising. It wasn't on the actual sales of the article.

[49:54] David: Yeah. Gosh, it's been so long since anybody's made money in advertising in comic books that it didn't even occur to me. You used to be able to sell advertising in these magazines and actually make a decent chunk of change out of it, because your distribution was 700,000 units every month. So, you could actually, legitimately, make a case for having people spend money with you. Yeah, that's not the case now.

[50:15] John: Yeah. I mean, in the late 90s, I was working for a jewelry company, making a lot of ads that were running in high-end fashion magazines, in Vogue and W, and all these things that were really big—I mean, Vogue’s still around—but really big, at the time, and ad spaces weren't cheap, and those magazine were 300 pages, 150 of which were ads, if not more, and that just has a feedback effect that once you stop, when circulation starts dropping, even if it's dropping for everybody, the ads stop coming in, the finances stop working. So, the circulation is going to wind up dropping further, if you're not able to—whatever—promote it, or even just get it, and even just afford to print it. If you can't afford to print the book, that's really going to hurt your circulation.

[50:58] David: Yeah. I feel like you've hit on something there, John.

[51:01] John: I might be onto something here, David. It's funny, just thinking about the grocery store, and […] too, though. I remember, early on, buying comics at the grocery store. I remember that's where I got some comics when I was a little kid, before I got into comics. I've got kids. They do look at stuff there, and they'll see a Pokémon magazine, or something, and my son will want it, or my daughter used to want stuff that she’d see there, because they want everything in the grocery store. That's not specific to magazines. That's specific to any aisle in the grocery store, but also, I think kids are reading a bunch of comics. Kids are reading Dog Man, and you go into Target, and there's a whole section of comics that didn't used to be there. If it's not the form that I had, when I was a kid, or whatever, there's still walls of manga, and walls of middle-grade and YA graphic novels, and the occasional thing Tom Waltz wrote.

[51:58] David: This is just a change of format, and a change in business direction. I didn't take these announcements as something, where it's the canary in the coal mine, or something like that.

[52:08] John: Oh, no, I don't think so, either.

[52:10] David: And I agree with you. I think that while this thing called newsstand distribution is a relic, in a lot of ways, clinging to the rocks, at this point, the health of the graphic novel illustrated story space is still really healthy. Manga alone is dominating the conversation of what pop culture is about in 2025. The American culture is so strongly influenced by manga and anime in 2025. It's certainly not the other way around. It used to be, I'm sure, the other way around. The United States was the tastemaker for the world, in a lot of ways, because we had all the creative powerhouses, here in the US, and I think manga just alone, by itself, has certainly changed the conversation. So, I took this as Archie’s just trying to make newsstand distribution continue to work, and trying to find a way to make it work, because that's probably still a pretty decent chunk of their bread and butter.

[53:13] John: Yeah. I have no idea. I'm curious about how much of that really is. As a macro thing, comics people tend to focus so much on the comics-ness of this, but I think when we're looking back on this era of time, there are so many self-created problems that we've had. I mean, there always is. I guess, that's the history of humanity, but the way we've managed to demonetize ways that used to make money for entertainment is astounding and reckless. I can't imagine anybody looking back on now, and being like, “the model for what you had for TV in 2006—whenever peak TV was—you then decided to just make everything streaming?”

[53:53] David: Yeah. “You were so happy that you just destroyed it?” I feel like there's a lot of that going on in 2025.

[54:01] John: When you look at where magazines were—

[54:04] David: “That's awesome, but what if we just jacked it up? What if we just completely destroy this platform, in lieu of this untested thing over here that we've never done before? What if we just do that?”

[54:17] John: Yeah, and I don't know—maybe in the 1400s, the town criers were all running around, being like, “this print thing's going to wreck our business.” I feel like, within the comics world, we complain about how bad comics are at doing things, but they are part of a larger world that is terrible at doing things, and a lot of times, they've been navigating that water. The direct market was super solid in the early 2000s. Anybody would have rather been there than anywhere else in publishing, I think.

[54:48] David: 100%. Even outside. The music industry was just literally wiped out. It was just gone. Napster showed up, and 3 days later, the entire record industry was gone, and we didn't have that in comic books. Interesting stuff, John. That's good reminisce about Archie Comics.

[55:12] John: All right. It takes me back to that time, nearly two weeks ago, when I first started reading Archie Comics.

[55:20] David: And killed their entire format. The man responsible for killing Archie Digest. That's the title of this one. “I killed Archie.” All right, thanks, everybody, for coming. Hope you guys had a good time. I loved it. Thanks, John. Thanks for all the heavy lifting on this one. I’m fully entertained by that one. We're going to be back next week, like we always are, John, and I don't know if I’ve said this, but you know we’ve got a third season coming up, and you still haven't written the intro for it.

[55:49] John: I also trust, neither have you.

[55:50] David: I have a lot of responsibilities for this podcast. We'll see you next time, on The Corner Box.

[55:55] John: Bye.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates and links at www.thecornerbox.club, and we’ll be back next week with more from David and John, here at The Corner Box.