“Like, I thought the others were the ones who got tied up in a mystery.”
Scooby-Doo #15
DC Comics (October, 1998)
EDITORS: Brownyn Taggart, Dana Kurtin, Mike Brisbois, & Chuck Kim (scattered somewhere between the two stories)
COLORIST: Rick Taylor
“Broncos & Boogeymen”
WRITER: Michael Kraiger
PENCILER: Manny Galan
INKER: Mike DeCarlo
LETTERER: John Costanza
“South Pacific Scooby!”
WRITER: Chris Duffy
ARTIST/LETTERER: Tim Harkins
The first story finds the gang called to a rodeo run by Fred’s uncle because it seems the whole gang has large families and friends the others haven’t met. Seriously, it happens more in the comics than it does in the cartoon, and it happens a lot there. Anyway, the rodeo is dealing with strange accidents and the money being robbed by a cowboy ghost. It’s actually a pretty decent mystery but if they dropped the backstory they might have more room to point to the specific culprit for the audience to try to guess. Plus, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the first time the gang went to a rodeo in this franchise, so I can only guess the writer wanted to use them to impart some knowledge onto the young target readers. Overall a good story.
The back-up story has an anthropologist visiting an island and not realizing they’re a pretty modern bunch. So the guy she’s interviewing decides to mess with her a bit and reinterprets the time Scooby landed on the island and helped defeat a fake volcano monster without the gang. Not much to say here. It’s a fun little tale thanks mostly to the framing device.
This is a good issue and worth checking out, though I wish more space had been given to the main story, fun as the back-up is. What is it kids comics around this time not doing a full comic-length story most of the time? For example if you read my Mighty Morphin Power Rangers comic reviews from this period you see the same thing, but the stuff based on the DC and Marvel shows were full-length. I can’t follow the thinking here.
BW Media Spotlight 
Maybe the editors’ thinking at the time was young kids were starting to display lower attention spans compared with the past (that was 1998….imagine what the attention spans of young kids are like in 2020!). The editors probably assumed that the main readers for the Scooby Doo comics and other cartoon comics were young kids. But these editors forgot that 1998 also had people in their 20s and 30s who had nostagia for the Scooby Doo cartoons of their youth.
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That doesn’t explain why the Adventures titles, based off of the cartoons at the time set in the DCAU, were full-length.
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Specifically, in terms of the Scooby Doo comic book, the editors probably viewed that as a “kiddie” comic. They figured that the “kiddies” of 1998 had shorter attention spans compared to the youngsters from 10 to 20 before, and thus the emphasis on having a main story and a back story for that title.
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Should have written as “youngsters from 10 to 20 years before,….” I accidentally left off the word “years”.
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