It’s your friendly annual reminder to go out and visit your friendly neighborhood comic shop and pick up some free comics.

Free Comic Book Day is an annual event that takes place the first Saturday in May (May 1, 2010) to help generate – or regenerate – interest in comic books.

A lot of the big comic companies release titles for the day and, depending on your shop, you can often find a few decent indies as well. Some even dump out those quarter boxes simply to get them out of the store.

FXLabs Studios has finally finished work on its PC game, Archie’s Riverdale Run. Its been quite a while, since the project was originally announced in early 2006 and scheduled to be completed in 2007. Of course, the project was also originally planned for both PCs and consoles. Today (September 4, 2008), FXLabs confirmed that the game is completed and the developer is now looking for publishers around the world to release it.

Archie’s Riverdale Run is a completely 3D racing/action/adventure game where players get to star Archie, Betty, Jughead, Reggie or Veronica. Once you pick a character, you race through Riverdale trying to complete missions…

As if the hand of Dan DeCarlo was guiding me from the grave, I recently came across another potentially prophetic message coming from Archie Comics.

This instance is in an issue of Betty and Veronica Digest Magazine (no. 125, Jan. 2002) with a story titled “Game Gambit” featuring fictional game maker Zapco Games. The company has asked Betty, the blonde-next-door and sometimes gender-bending teenager, to help test a series of arcade games targeted towards girls.

As one of the Gamertell writers recently pointed out in an email, “Is it just me, or does September seem like the month of feminine games?” Indeed, it appears that way with a slew of demographically-targeted games being released throughout September 2008…

In browsing the web, I stumbled upon a mention of the latest Dr. Who spinoff on the Who’s Who section of Hartbreak Films web site. Hartbreak is the production company created and run by Paula Hart and her daughter, Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clarissa Explains it All fame.

From the site:

Hartbreak is also involved in the development of a live action kids series K9 featuring based on the character from Dr. Who written by Bob Baker (Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit).

According to the site Adventures in Time and Space, K-9 should already be…

In browsing through my comic book archives I found an issue of Betty & Veronica Double Digest (No. 62, January 1997), published by Archie Comics. The issue’s cover features Betty playing a videogame against a typically cranky Veronica on an nondescript game system.

Maybe it’s the nature of the art but the controllers don’t have any wires. It’s either a wise prediction or fortuitous foreshadowing on the part of Archie artist Dan DeCarlo. Eleven years later and wireless controllers are the norm.

Another interesting bit of possible predicting is that…

There’s something about old advertisements that can kick in those warm and fuzzy nostalgic feelings. I guess that is why many sell for pretty pennies per page at flee markets. In the September 1992 issue of the Betty published by Archive Comics (don’t you judge me!) there seemed to be an unusual number of video more »