For our readers, could you clarify your role and the top management structure at Archie?
Sure, thanks for having me. Obviously, Jon Goldwater's our CEO and Publisher and he's also Executive Producer on Riverdale and the upcoming Sabrina TV show, so he's overseeing pretty much everything.
Mike Pellerito and I are Co-Presidents. We both do parts of editorial, meaning I oversee some of the monthly books, he oversees some of them. I still have a hand in the communications, the day-to-day publicity and social media and promotions and marketing and stuff like that. It's a bit of a blended role.
I came up in the company doing publicity and marketing and then added some editorial stuff like the Dark Circle line, and now that's expanded into doing some work with the Archie books, like Archie #700, Jughead: The Hunger, Vampironica, stuff like that.
Maybe we could start out by talking a little bit about what you're seeing in the marketplace. Archie has a different visibility (you’re in four channels); talk a little bit about what you're seeing in each channel and what the differences are.
It's an interesting time. What we're seeing resonate really well in the direct market is, obviously, with Archie #1 with Mark Waid and Fiona, that opened the door to Archie being a much stronger presence in the direct market and expanding that line.
We're seeing the horror books really resonate in comic shops. We've put a lot of editorial energy into expanding that line and maintaining it with stuff like Jughead: The Hunger. We just announced two launches in the horror line: following up on Vampironica, we're going to do a crossover, Jughead: The Hunger vs. Vampironica, and Blossoms 666, which will be written by Cullen Bunn. The crossover will be written by Frank Tieri, who writes the Jughead: The Hunger book.
When are those coming out?
Both of them are coming out early next year.
People are really responding to these kind of alternative takes on the classic Archie IP, so Jughead as a werewolf, Veronica as a vampire, or a zombie apocalypse in Riverdale. Even the more traditional new Archie takes that still honor the classic stuff but push the story forward, we're seeing people respond to those, so like Archie, Sabrina, that iteration of Sabrina is really working for us in the direct market. Those in turn, work in collections.
In terms of the book market, we've seen a really good response to curated collections of the classic material. Even stuff like Jughead's Time Police, which was kind of a quirky title in the 80s and part of that explosion of series in the mid- to late-80s at Archie, like Faculty Funnies, or Dilton's Strange Science or things like that. Just curated collections of the titles as (in addition to the kind of digest-like best-ofs we've been doing) those have been working really well for us along with the standard five-issue collections of the ongoing books.
The newsstand still continues to work for us, because we have the format. The digest really works well for that casual, almost candy-like buy, a kid sees it on the checkout and picks it up. That's still the introduction for a lot of people to comics.
You're still buying checkout space in the supermarkets?
Yeah, we've been maintaining our space.
Every digest has new Archie stories. While we're reprinting from our library, we're also seeing new stuff that we can then eventually theme and sometimes retrofit into the direct market or other places that we think work best.
In those four channels (including digital), are there trends towards different kinds of content? What changes are you seeing?
For the newsstand, we're still seeing that classic Archie has a place, and people still respond to it. They appreciate the kind of sitcom-like structure. There's no continuity to those stories, so you can pick up a digest at any point and it is what it is.
In terms of the direct market, people like the contrast of Archie or these classic iconic characters in, not always violent, but sometimes funny and bizarre situations. Something like Archie vs. Predator, which we did in partnership with Dark Horse a couple years ago, really did well for us. It's just kind of the oddball nature of it.
That kind of trickles down to the more traditional new Archie stuff, even something like the Archies book, which you would think is a pretty standard Archie comic. You throw in real life bands and people respond to it, or things like that, where it's an element of the real world interacting with the Archies really creates something unique.
In terms of digital, we're seeing that it reflects the direct market in many ways, but also, there's outliers. There's books that maybe don't resonate in the direct market, that, for whatever reason, have a longer shelf life on digital.
Sometimes the collections that have been out for a while suddenly bump up digitally because they tie into something more recent, if you have a new issue from a series that's been dormant, and people go back and get the collection. There's a lot of kind of repeat buying there.
We're still doing well with our app. We have a good relationship with the vendors, comiXology and places like that. Digital's a big part of our strategy.
Can you characterize how those different channels rank in importance for Archie?
They're all valuable in different ways. The bookstore market gives us a second bite for a lot of the content that we're feeding into the direct market, and we've been trying to think of ways to maximize content. If there's a new story in the digest, how can we get that back into the direct market in a unique way.
We're doing this book Betty & Veronica Friends Forever, which is new digest stories, but formatted for the direct market with a new cover, some design. That way we have new classic Archie content for the direct market as opposed to just keeping that on the newsstand. We're trying to maximize the stuff we're doing for different places and being mindful of what formats work best where.
Similarly, we have a digest that's just unique digest stories that we send to digital exclusively. We're seeing good response to that, to unique exclusive digital content.
Jumping from the traditional or classic Archie style to the more modern Fiona/Waid aesthetic, it just seemed like a natural breaking point to have a new #1. Then as Mark's fantastic run was ending, we're all spitballing, ‘what's a meaningful way to say this is a new story,’ and it feels like everything's relaunching with a new number one.
While some people have been doing the legacy numbering, it just added up. It seemed like a fun way to revisit the history, but also look forward. When we pitched it to Jon Goldwater, he really focused in on it. It's a fun thing to do. We didn't want to overthink it. It seemed like a fun thing to do, the numbers line up.
You counted the Waid editions, right?
Yeah, we added the Waid issues to the traditional numbering and then we did a special #699 promo comic to kind of close out the gap.
While Nick's story is different because they're different writers, it's still in the same vein as Mark. He's continuing that story. Marguerite Savage is an artist we've worked with many times doing covers and things like that, and I've always wanted to work with her as an interior artist. Everything lined up with that. It's going to be a beautiful book, and it's really going to play to Nick's strengths. It's going to explore this hidden history of Riverdale.
A lot of people are taking the shorthand and saying, "Oh, it's just going to imitate the show." It's not, it's going to echo a lot of elements of Archie in different ways. It's going to run parallel to Riverdale, but it's very much its own thing.
Riverdale has just been such a huge phenomenon, obviously as a TV show, just a hit in its own right. What we're seeing on the publishing side is just an increased awareness. The hope is, obviously, whenever you have a hit media tie-in is that the fans will come back to the publishing. We've definitely seen an uptick in that regard, in that, the interest is there and people who have discovered these characters through the show are now kind of filtering back to the publishing, which is exciting.
And what’s going on with the Riverdale comic?
We're going to relaunch it early next year and it'll be written by Nicole Osto, who's the novelist who's writing the Scholastic tie-in novels for us. It'll be the same art team as the previous year’s.
The hope with Nicole is, because she's doing these tie-in novels, she's also connected to the writers' room and she'll have some back and forth with them. It's definitely in partnership with the Riverdale writers' room, so they'll see what's happening. Roberto [Aguirre-Sacasa] obviously is very tied into the day-to-day at Archie, so he'll see what's happening with the scripts. The hope is that it'll be a much more synergized story.
The iteration we're going to see on Netflix hews much closer to Roberto and Robert Hack's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina horror comic. The trailer is fantastic. It's the same executive producer who's doing Riverdale.
We've seen a lot of movement on the first volume of the first Sabrina graphic novel; a lot of people who are anticipating the show are eager to tap into the comic.
We're reprinting that issue next month through Diamond and putting on a tie-in cover, so that'll capitalize on the show. Also, we're looking at ways to repackage older Sabrina material and obviously, we're kind of fast-tracking doing some original new content as well.
Are you going to do a comic tie-in like you did with Riverdale?
It's an interesting conundrum, because Riverdale is very much the whole Archie aesthetic and it's its own thing; whereas Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is very directly tied to a specific take on the character. We're talking and trying to figure out what the best way to do it is.
You talked about this a little bit earlier, but maybe you could talk a little bit about what's going on in the horror line.
When Jon and Roberto and the team started Afterlife with Archie they really tapped into something unexpected in terms of these alternative Archie takes. We didn't expect the response, and it was huge.
We've slowly but surely expanded the line, and I think we've kind of stepped on the gas a bit over the last six months. We launched Vampironica, which (it's kind of self-explanatory) has Veronica Lodge, socialite, as a vampire. She's given vampiric powers. That was by Greg and Meg Smallwood, and that did really well for us.
At the same time, we had Jughead the Hunger, which is Jughead, who loves to eat burgers, is now a werewolf and eats people. [laughs] That was by Frank Tieri and Joe Eisma, and the Kennedy brothers.
We see the pieces are kind of coming together to build this little horror universe. Who would have thought 20 years ago that Archie would be one of the premier horror comics publishers? It became a no-brainer, like how do we cross these pieces over?
We've always had this kind of bubbling evil under them, and you can see it a little bit in Riverdale and in Afterlife. It's the first time we've spotlighted them in a solo series in a long time, and definitely the first horror take. He'll be writing that. Laura Braga, who did the Harley and Ivy -- Betty and Veronica crossover's going to do the art.
After that, we've definitely got some other stuff in the pipeline. I think we're excited to really see that world flourish, because people seem to really be responding to it.
