The latest issue of Archie Digest is primarily a reprint of Archie Comics #1, and that first Archie story from Pep, and a couple of goofy "2007 Archie meets 1942 Archie" thingys. Funny, in that my editorial judgement would have stuffed the Jackpot Comics story which appeared in the same month as the Pep story -- the Pep story reprinted quasi-all-the-time (though, realistically, not for 15 years), the Jackpot story never reprinted.

I assume it's a jump in sales. In one sense I see no reason for the company to not do this, and in another sense I do. I think there's a raison d'tre for Archie Digests to not make any particular digest stick out too much, for them to be bemusing bathroom reading.

I leafed through the digests as I usually do -- Jughead Double Digest featured a lack of material that pleases me; Betty and Veronica was better -- though none of the Dan Decarlo material was from a "classic" period which if meted out in bulk would have gotten me to buy it, and was of this curious vintage where I have it reprinted in earlier. I always thought that editor of Archie Digests would be a great job, but I suspect that the editorial guidelines would crush such a job -- on a lease as to what gets to be reprinted, and for some reason they're sorted into clustered such that clusters get reprinted at the same time, and the editing job somehow has come to entail awkwardly editing late 1950 stories where a contemporarious rock band is mentioned and whited-out to mention, say, Green Day. (I saw a reference to such an editing job on a blog.) [The editing job now shifts through some odds and ends of Archie Comics history -- recently the company published just about the entire Jughead's Time Police set of stories in the double digest, and as a by-product slid their way to this strangely impressive Gene Colan story from 1988 which tweaked the formula in some interesting ways -- and just an issue ago they republished from an era I'd thought they would never republish from out of, the official website actually deriding this moment in their history -- albeit pulled from a previous fan-site -- the Daryl Edelman experiment.)

A dirty little secret is that the Archie Comics of the 1940s weren't particularly good or interesting. I read the Americana Series volume 2, and it really was off-putting and dull. But historical purposes insist you purchase that Archie Digest -- and lull yourself through that weird funny animal bear strip that was in the first issue of Archie Comics -- and onto the re-introduction of Veronica...