A glance in any bookstore around Christmas time will reveal that Annuals continue to be a festive tradition, with brightly-coloured tomes reflecting the pop cultural obsessions of today’s young generation. Of the titles we had back in the 70s, only a handful remain – Dandy and Beano will both celebrate their centenaries in around fifteen years, and both annuals remain in print even if only one of them is still an actual comic. Rupert is still going, and still in the same yellow check trousers, but there’s not much else out there that a comics or TV fan of the 70s would recognise. Guinness World Records still appears year on year – we got our one and only copy back in 1972 – whilst Ripley’s Believe it Or Not continues to log barely believable facts and figures in a series that Wikipedia reckons started in 2005. Now, I hate to disagree, but I have a copy cover-dated 1974, which was given to my brother at Christmas fifty years ago. It’s a World Distributors effort, compiled from reprints of the American Believe It or Not comic book. Other offerings for 2024 include Pokemon (still popular after all this time?), Peppa Pig, Thomas the Tank Engine, Minecraft (*sigh*) and a bunch of other kids’ TV tie-ins (presumably) that I’ve never heard of.
 |
| A design car crash: some of the garishly-coloured covers of this year's annuals. |
In an era when children’s entertainment is dominated by social media, I find it rather reassuring (© 1977 Ned Sherrin) to see such publications piled up in Smiths, even if many of them look like they were put together by a team of colour blind AI chimpanzees...
A modern Beano book with its glossy four colour interior is a very different animal from the more austere versions I remember from the 1970s, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing (although I can’t see today’s kids going a bundle on the old two-colour print jobs). In common with most modern publications, today’s annuals are garish in appearance, with covers that are cluttered, over-coloured and over-designed. The golden turkey for worst offender this year must go to the Match of the Day Annual, whose cover is the worst piece of design I have ever seen on a professional publication. It literally looks as if the designer has dropped all the photo cut-outs and typographic elements he needs into a page template and then just left them where they landed. To think of someone getting paid to do hack work like this while I remain unemployed is galling to say the least: not that I’d go a bundle on designing any kind of football publication. Even the once reliable Rupert is a car crash of colour with its cheap computer rendering. Compared to the subtly toned, hand-painted covers that once graced the Rupert books, this is almost a travesty. Clearly, budget is king and no one will pay for ‘real world’ artwork any more. I wonder if any comic artist still owns a box of paints? Still, if it sells, it sells, so who am I to argue. What would today's kids make of the annuals I had as a child? Not much, I'll wager.
For me, it is now more than twenty years since I last bought an annual – 2002 saw both Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds back in print from Carlton, tied in to their recent revival on BBC television. Design-wise, they didn’t have a lot going for them: generic ‘high tech’ Photoshop covers, and fonts that just screamed ‘early 21st century’. The only reason I bought them was for the photo-strips they contained, adapted from TV episodes. In an era before frame grabs were easily obtainable, this was a good opportunity to study the characters and hardware. Feature items borrowed material from the 1960s annuals to provide biographies of the characters. At sixty A4 pages each, they were somewhat lightweight compared to the annuals of the 60s, but they were in colour throughout and I’m sure the youngsters of 2001 were more than happy with them. One thing decidedly lacking from these publications is nostalgic value: ignoring the dated Photoshop work and typography, they look barely any different from this year’s crop and could sit alongside them in any bookshop without raising an eyebrow. You couldn’t say that of 1963’s Fireball XL5 Annual, which looks properly of its time.
Rather better were the efforts of Howard & Wyndham whose Brown Watson imprint was responsible for a late flowering of TV crime tie-in annuals during the late 70s. Beginning in 1977 with The Sweeney and The New Avengers, the annuals ran for only a year or two. The company’s history is hard to make out: Howard & Wyndham was a theatre-owning and management company that later owned shares in Independent Television, which might explain the publishing tie-ins. However, the company closed eight years before the first of these annuals appeared in bookshops. Brown Watson, meanwhile, continues as a children’s book imprint, based in Leicester, but with a history going back to only 1980.
1977’s first Sweeney Annual was arguably the best of these publications, featuring some terrific comic strip art from Brian Lewis – his style was instantly familiar to me from the work he’d done on the Countdown comic – alongside a few photo-illustrated text stories and features. It wouldn’t surprise me if the designer had worked on Look-in or even the Blue Peter books, as the page layouts are strong and reminiscent of those titles. The second year’s effort saw the standards slip somewhat, with fewer photographs and, for my money, inferior artwork. Brian Lewis was otherwise occupied illustrating that year’s Van Der Valk Annual, turning in some excellent colour pages.
The two New Avengers Annuals followed a similar format, with the second including two very recognisable David Lloyd strips, adapted from TV episodes. One thing that all of these Brown Watson titles had in their favour was fidelity to the on-screen graphic look of the various series, and the covers were all very well done, within the limitations of contemporary print technology.
1978 really was my last year of having annuals bought for me at Christmas, and alongside these creditable publications we find, sadly, the very worst of all the examples I’ve considered in the course of these articles. Return of the Saint Annual, hailing from Knutsford-based publishing house Stafford Pemberton, arrived in the same year as the series itself. The look of this all-colour publication was reminiscent of the Century 21 storybooks of a decade earlier. The only artist I can identify is Malcolm Stokes, who had worked on City Magazines’ annuals and Countdown comic. He was definitely not responsible for the comic strips, which were scrappily drawn and amateurishly lettered. Photographs were in short supply, and rendered quite badly: the colour printing wasn’t helped by the use of inferior paper that soaked up the ink and made for a dull appearance. I remember being very disappointed with this annual when I got it. Okay, it scored points for using the correct TV title sequence logo, but the cover was a design exercise in how not to do it. It's a shame to go out on a low note, but as we've seen, the golden age of annuals was well and truly over. By now, classics like the Rupert books of the 1930s were being faithfully reprinted using techniques and materials that captured the essence of such vintage items. But no one was seriously going to do that for a modern title aimed at a modern audience.
One wonders how long annuals will continue as an end of year tradition. They may be barely recognisable from the thoughfully-crafted publications of my youth, but at least they're still there: and in a world where online is increasingly the name of the game, that should be some small cause for celebration. Just don't get me that Match of the Day annual for Christmas, okay?
No comments:
Post a Comment