Annual Is Horrible, It Is

If you are not British -- and it may interest you to learn that according to Google Analytics, slightly more than half of this blog's hits have come from outside the UK -- you may not be familiar with the concept of the Christmas annual. In essence, they're nice big hardback books produced for the holiday season, usually based around an existing property, featuring comic strips, text stories, puzzle pages and other features. They're probably most associated with anthology comics such as the Beano, but over the years ones have appeared for magazines, TV dramas, pop stars, childrens' books, game shows... you name it. (They're sometimes referred to as "yearbooks" for franchises less associated with children. As a side-anecdote, I found a bunch of Jackie annuals from the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop just the other day which had, written on their price labels, the words "CHECKED -- NO ONE DODGY".)

At some point, someone seemed to have a bright idea: Why not expand this winning formula to non-British properties that are popular over here? Well, they tried, but in a lot of cases the answer to that question is: Because you're not going to be able to produce any new content for such a book (or if you are you're going to be very limited in what you can do), pretty much all the material is going to have to be pre-existing.

And, to be fair, even then they had a stab at it: there was a regular Simpsons annual for a few years in the 2010s, which used existing Simpsons Comics strips and art from a variety of sources, plus (in the earlier ones) some newly made puzzle pages and text features such as "Homer J. Simpson Presents A Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette", again with all images being pre-existing art; I'd be hard-pressed to describe them as classics of the genre, but they do a reasonable job of not obviously looking like they just slapped together a bunch of stuff they had the rights to print. Other shows, however, were not so lucky. One annual in particular comes to mind as quite possibly the worst, most slapdash piece of officially licensed media based on a TV show ever published (at least, that I'm aware of). Before the jump cut, perhaps you'd like to guess what it is.

Well, the mash-up-of-available-publicity-stills cover doesn't bode well, let's look at the contents page...

So, the first comic isn't even a complete one: it's a 7-page excerpt from a one-shot issue of the Dark Horse Comics series, which appears to be abridged to try to tell a coherent story whilst leaving out everything from the point where the plot leaves Sunnydale. Needless to say, it fails miserably; what is left is more or less incomprehensible. Wilderness, to its credit, does appear to be complete, and this annual might have been a convenient way for UK readers to get it at the time. The rest of the space is filled with covers from other Dark Horse issues, which they've had the audacity to bill as "pinups" even when they're used for the endpapers. That is literally all. I mean, if there is a worse book of any kind based on a licensed property, I'd like to see it. There isn't even a wordsearch.