I don't remember what my first Archie Digest was. In fact I don't remember what year I read my first one in. They've just always been part of my life. They were everywhere. I even remember reading some in the waiting room of one of the clinics at CHEO. But, if there was one year that I began collecting the various Archie Digest titles it would have to be 2001 when I had an operation to try to fix my left foot enough so I could walk without any assistance. However, my earliest encounter with an Archie digest was back in 1993 when my mom bought me the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Classics Digest, from the CHEO gift shop. I don't even remember why I was even at CHEO that time. I think it was just for an appointment, but it could've been a full day of appointments or for day surgery. Regardless, I was with her when she bought the digest for me, so I know I hadn't been admitted to the hospital for any reason.
However, in 2001, my mom had been at the grocery store and happened to see Jughead's Double Digest #80 while she was at the cash and thought I might like it. At this point we had maybe two or three Archie digests in the house at the time, but they were for my siblings and I and so they were on a bookshelf in our basement, where our communal "Kids Area" was located. This is where we would watch TV or play one of our Nintendo consoles, be it the NES, the Super Nintendo, or the N64. My Teddy Ruxpin books were down there, as were several of our other children's books that we still had that had been bought for all of us. This Jughead comic though was the first Archie digest that I kept in my bedroom and was just for me. However it would be another year before my collection began in earnest. In 2002 I got Jughead with Archie #176. But it would still be a few months before I got another Digest.
Then in February 2003 I went into kidney failure and ended up in the hospital over the March Break. This is where my Archie digest collection really began. I've been collecting ever since. And like I said, my mom didn't discriminate. It didn't matter if the book was Archie, Jughead, or Betty & Veronica. If there were Archie characters on the cover, she bought it for me, no questions asked. Not because she was treating me like a child despite me being in my teens (she wasn't). Not because I was in the hospital quite a lot in 2003 between kidney failure, esophagial surgery and appointments relating to those. She bought them for me because I genuinely loved reading Archie comics. I didn't have access to a comic book store because I still lived out in the country back then and the nearest comic book stores were 20 to 30 minutes away and gas was just starting to become expensive. So regular trips into the city were less frequent and limited to the occasional trip to Chapters, the movies and hospital visits for appointments. However the digests were sold at pretty much every grocery store in our area, so they were easier to get than the regular Archie comics, or any DC or Marvel book, were at the time. And like I said, I loved reading them.
When I was a teenager, reading the Archie digests were an escape from the insanity of life as a high school student. A reminder that there was at least one high school where the problems I was facing as a physically handicapped boy, and as it turns out a boy who is on the Autism spectrum, who was in high school, didn't exist. A high school where Archie's only real problem was double booking when it came to dates with Betty and Veronica. As an adult the Archie digests hold a different significance to me though.
For the last three or four years of his life, I shared these digests with my grandfather. My mom would buy one for him and when he was finished with it, he'd pass it along to me. Or I'd buy one for myself and when I was finished with it, I'd pass it along to him. I didn't get the chance to talk to him about them, but I'd hear from Nana how much he enjoyed reading them. We got him a book of Peanuts comic strips to try, but he didn't take to them the same way he took to Archie and the gang. I love Peanuts so I inherited that book from him. But we bonded through Archie.
The thing I like most about the Archie digests, with the regular sized ones having been discontinued in 2010 and the Double Digests becoming Jumbo Comics in 2016, is that even though the series changed with Mark Waid's run on Archie in 2015, the digests kept the traditional Archie art style that has been a staple of the series since the '50s. Granted the majority of the stories are republished from the regular Archie comics from decades passed, but the first story is always a new story and that story is always in the traditional art style. Even the writing is your traditional Archie storytelling without all the CW level teen drama introduced in Waid's run.
Not to knock Waid's run because it's one of my favourite runs of modern day comic books, even over many of the runs that DC has produced in the last ten years. But, there's just something fun and timeless about the classic Archie stories and the art style. In my case it's more than just simple nostalgia, because like I said, I like Waid's run as much as I do the classic stories. It's just Archie represents a timelessness that is missing in most modern entertainment mediums these days. But the classic Archie comics can be enjoyed by someone in 2020 as much as they were enjoyed by someone in 1950. That's what the Archie digest titles represent.
Another thing that I love about the digests is that they contain stories about all aspects of the Archie comics. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Little Archie, Bingo Wilkins, Josie and the Pussycats, Archie 3000, and Archie 1 (prehistoric version of the Archie characters) all have stories in them, no matter what the title of the book is. This was my first exposure to Sabrina in the comics. I knew the character as played by Melissa Joan Hart on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but I'd never read her comics before. Until I got the digests. Strangely enough there was a period in the comics where they were more following the TV show than they were the classic Sabrina comics.
The one downside of the digests is that if you had a lot of them, you might've found that you had several copies of the same story. I found that in several of mine because I had such a big collection once upon a time. In fact there's a Little Archie Christmas story in the one I got this week, World of Archie Jumbo Comics Digest #104 that I remember reading a long time ago in an issue I had sometime in the mid 2000s, probably around 2004 or 2005. I don't even remember which issue I originally read the story in, I just remember the story from the past.
Another downside to the digests is that there isn't really a record of what stories are from what issues from the regular Archie comics titles. In most collected editions there's usually a list of what issues are collected in the book, whether it's a table of contents like in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, or a section on the back cover or on the publication information page after the main title page like most collected editions, be it hardcover or trade paperback. The Best of Archie collected editions have the title and the issue number at the top of the first page of a story, or on a specific page with memories of a story from an Archie fan, mainly comic book writers, journalists, and novelists. But the digests have never had anything like that and there's little to no information on them online either. In fact I did some digging, but came up short, because even on My Comic Shop, there's no information on what issues are collected in the digests, just titles for the stories. I guess when you pick up a digest you don't need to worry about what issue a story originally came from. It would just be nice if there was something to tell the reader what the original issue was so they could track it down if they so choose. That's just me though.
As I said, the Archie digests have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Sure there might be periods where I don't buy them as often, and I don't have my entire collection of nearly 20 years worth of Archie comics, which span nearly 80 years of stories. But they're still being sold. And because they're still being sold, I'm still buying them whenever I feel like picking up a classic Archie story that I maybe have never read before, or revisiting one I read many years ago like that Little Archie story in World of Archie Jumbo Comics Digest I mentioned earlier.
And that's my look at the Archie digests and my history with them that continues to unfold today. I don't get them as frequently anymore, especially since I don't have my grandfather to share them with anymore, but every once in a while, I'll pick one up and read it because even all these years later, I love the Archie Classics. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer so I can get that review out sometime tomorrow. Later.
*cover images were taken from the Archie Comics Digest and Jughead's Double Digest pages on My Comic Shop.
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