Comics UK

I've not bothered much with annuals, even though they are often easy to find at reasonable prices, because I had this vague assumption that they were mostly reprint material, but I'm wondering now how true this is. Thoughts, anyone?

Depends on the annual. The Dennis The Menace and Bash Street Kids annuals were all reprinted material from about 15 years before they were published. On the other hand DCT adventure annuals, like Victor or Warlord, were all new, complete stories. As the weeklies contained long serials they couldn't just reprint these! The recent two Victor annuals (one with reprints from the comic, the other with reprints from the annual) were even different sizes!). IPC adventure annuals tended to be more mixed, usually with some new stories (usually distinguishable by having larger panels and/or colour), some reprints from the weeklies and also text stories. Of course many annuals were also padded with articles, board games, quizzes, "interviews" and so on.

Earlier annuals, for instance Chums and Chatterbox, were a yearly hardback complilation of the preceding twelve month's weekly issues, which makes collecting those comics a lot easier today! The Viz annual does a similar thing today, but leaves out some of the "of the moment" topical articles, profanisaurus pages etc

I'm primarily interested in girls comics like Misty, Tammy, and Jinty. I have a Tammy annual, which I can't currently locate due to clutter, but which I recall had a number of un-Tammylike stories, some of which had been shrunk down small enough to fit two pages on each page. This suggested to me that they were probably reprints, likely from other comics.

Dandy and Beano annuals dont have much reprint material in them plus they can be expensive especially the wartime ones

Beano and Dandy - USUALLY no reprint (there's one early 90s Beano Book with a BSK story that frames a Retro Beano prototype, one Dandy Book reprinted a Tin Lizzie text story with new artwork, and another recycled a Winker Watson script, although it was redrawn).
Dennis the Menace and Bash Street - mostly reprint, but some longer stories and feature pages are new. The last two Dennis and Gnasher annuals are all new, and the very earliest Dennis annuals probably were as well.
Retro Beano and Dandy - obviously, all reprint, but often newly coloured.
Beezer, Topper, Sparky - similar to Beano and Dandy, but with more colour pages.
The IPC titles are far more likely to use ghost artists and reprints, whereas the DCT titles usually use the regular artist, unless the story either isn't in the weekly comic or is usually a reprint (i.e. Billy the Cat, Ivy the Terrible, almost everyone in the 2012 and 2013 Dandy Annuals).

The first (1956) Dennis The Menace annual had all reprinted strips only the text stories contained new artwork.

I'd say your impression of 1970s IPC annuals is pretty spot on Mari. Probably worth getting for a completist as they usually contained one or two new strips featuring regular characters, and chopped-up reprints of old serials can be a good way of reading complete stories that you've only seen from isolated episodes, but once you have all the original comics they become pretty superfluous.

By contrast DC Thomson annuals like Diana and Bunty regularly contained all-new material throughout the 1970s, while earlier Fleetway/IPC annuals from the 1960s had a much higher percentage of new stuff. Generally speaking Summer Specials from the two companies were pretty similar, though they tend to be much harder to find.

- Phil Rushton

philcom55 wrote:I'd say your impression of 1970s IPC annuals is pretty spot on Mari. Probably worth getting for a completist as they usually contained one or two new strips featuring regular characters ... but once you have all the original comics they become pretty superfluous.
- Phil Rushton

I think that's quite an exaggeration, Phil! Lots of '70s IPC annuals were packed with new material, both humour and adventure strips; maybe about 17 out of about 160 pages being reprint.

I agree with Raven. I don't know about girls comics but certainly the boys adventure material was mostly original.

I think I have noticed that some 70s and 80s IPC girl's annuals featured some School Friend and/or Girl's Crystal type material. Much smaller panels is a giveaway.

dandy mad wrote:The first (1956) Dennis The Menace annual had all reprinted strips only the text stories contained new artwork.

So much for the seven year rule. Dennis only debuted in 1951, so those strips were only four years old at the most (since it will have been published in 1955).

I was thinking more of the girls' annuals - just checked a Misty one (admittedly early 1980s rather than 1970s) and I reckon that at least 80% of it is either reprint or cheap text filler material.

Even so, I'd be interested if anyone can point to one of IPC's boys' adventure annuals from the 1970s that was only 10% reprint.

- Phil R.

philcom55 wrote: Even so, I'd be interested if anyone can point to one of IPC's boys' adventure annuals from the 1970s that was only 10% reprint.
- Phil R.

Just looking through a couple of randomly picked Valiant annuals, I'd estimate that around 89-98 of the 160 pages in those two are original material.

I was thinking of some of the predominantly humour ones for my earlier estimation.

You might be thinking of comics that had been cancelled. Titles like Star*Lord, Action etc would begin their annual run with virtually all-new material. When they had been cancelled, the annuals would go downhill very soon, becoming mostly reprint.

I guess then it's a case of, if they'll sell, write them. If they won't, reprint them.

Digifiend wrote:

dandy mad wrote:The first (1956) Dennis The Menace annual had all reprinted strips only the text stories contained new artwork.

So much for the seven year rule. Dennis only debuted in 1951, so those strips were only four years old at the most (since it will have been published in 1955).

Don't think the 7 year rule existed back in 1955