Yesterday we talked about the Bloodlines event that ran through DC Annuals back in 1993. And that got me thinking about the whole concept of the annual.
For you youngsters out there, I know this is a strange concept, but the Big Two used to put out annuals for all of their major titles...every single year!! That's right, annuals were actually an annual event!
Granted, Marvel was a lot more consistent about it than DC...from the mid-late 1970s up until 2001, if you were a major Marvel title, you were having an annual during the summer, dammit. DC was always a little bit spottier--Wonder Woman, for example, didn't have an annual in 1990 or 1991, nor 1993 0r 94, for some reason. That's why there was no Wonder Woman Bloodlines character...
For some reason, they pretty much stopped doing the annuals at the turn of the century. DC didn't have any after 2000, Marvel after 2001. But lately, they've started to creep back into vogue.
In the "good old days," Marvel used their annuals for special events: Doctor Doom's origins!! Reed & Sue's wedding!! The Sinister Six!! Soon, though, they sort of devolved into just another story, a thirteenth issue per year of your favorite mag. Sometime a good (or great!) story, sometimes filler, sometimes utter crap. But it was always there.
What always interested me was the way Marvel, and especially DC, used their annuals in the 1990s. They would run company-wide events through the annuals, rather than publishing a stand-alone Blackest Night type series. Instead of a million crossovers or spin-off mini-series, the stories were mostly contained in just the annuals, usually with a pair of "bookend" specials to introduce and conclude the story.
Marvel started the ball rolling in 1988, with the "Evolutionary Wars" story, which ran through their annuals that summer.
They followed in 1989 with the "Atlantis Attacks" storyline:
(Please don't ask what Spidey and She-Hulk mixing it up with the Abomination had to do with Atlantis...it's very complicated).
Marvel apparently had enough of line-wide crossovers, so for the next few years they sort of "grouped" their annuals, with 4 or 5 "teamed-up" to present one storyline, whle the other annuals did their thing. So we had stories likes "Days Of Future Present" that ran through the Fantastic Four and X-Annuals:
Or the "Vibranium Vendetta":
Or "The Return Of The Defenders":
After 1992, Marvel dropped the crossover annuals, and they became stand-alones again...except for 1998, when everyone had odd, joint "team-up" annuals:
By 2001, Marvel annuals were done.
DC stuck with the "theme" idea longer than Marvel. It started in 1991, with the "Armageddon: 2001" story:
(Spoiler Alert: that Armageddon never happened. Phew...)
They followed in 1992 with the storyline in which everybody gave into temptation, "Eclipso: The Darkness Within."
1993 featured the lameness of space parasites inadvertently creating a whole bunch of new heroes, "Bloodlines":
(I chose to picture that one, because everybody loooves Jamm so much).
After that DC got away from line-wide storylines, and chose instead to have all of a given year's annuals follow a set theme. In 1994, it was Elseworlds stories:
In 1995, DC featured "Year One" stories of their heroes:
1996 brought "Legends of the Dead Earth," stories set far, far in the future, after Earth was gone but the legacies of our heroes still influenced things:
1997 shifted to "Pulp Heroes":
1998 focused on tales of a supernatural bent, "Ghosts":
Hey, look--Nekron!!
1999 featured the famous, soon-to-be-ripped-off-by-Marvel JLApe:
In 2000, DC once again tried to force feed...err, introduce a plethora of new heroes, with "Planet DC," which featured various foreign heroes cavorting with the name heroes. (Planet DC is more snarkily known as "Bloodlones Mark II" for it's largely unsuccessful attempt to mass create new heroes for the DC Universe):
At the risk of offending any Argentinian readers, I refrain from Evita jokes here...
2000 was DC's last gasp for annuals.
Nowadays the annuals seem to be, slowly, creeping back into vogue. Sometimes they're just a place to dump late stories, or inventory stories; sometimes a place to stick an origin story, or introduce a new character (like this month's Batman/Detective annuals).
But this sporadic, hot-or-miss, whenever-we-feel-like-it-but-some-years-we-don't schedule sort of defeats the purpose of calling it an "annual." So come on, DC and Marvel--let's commit. If you want to publish annuals, do it annually.
And I thought that using annuals for crossover events or themes was kind of cool. Much cooler than making me buy 3 issues of slow-paced Black Night: Batman. So don't be afraid to try that, OK?
For you youngsters out there, I know this is a strange concept, but the Big Two used to put out annuals for all of their major titles...every single year!! That's right, annuals were actually an annual event!
Granted, Marvel was a lot more consistent about it than DC...from the mid-late 1970s up until 2001, if you were a major Marvel title, you were having an annual during the summer, dammit. DC was always a little bit spottier--Wonder Woman, for example, didn't have an annual in 1990 or 1991, nor 1993 0r 94, for some reason. That's why there was no Wonder Woman Bloodlines character...
For some reason, they pretty much stopped doing the annuals at the turn of the century. DC didn't have any after 2000, Marvel after 2001. But lately, they've started to creep back into vogue.
In the "good old days," Marvel used their annuals for special events: Doctor Doom's origins!! Reed & Sue's wedding!! The Sinister Six!! Soon, though, they sort of devolved into just another story, a thirteenth issue per year of your favorite mag. Sometime a good (or great!) story, sometimes filler, sometimes utter crap. But it was always there.
What always interested me was the way Marvel, and especially DC, used their annuals in the 1990s. They would run company-wide events through the annuals, rather than publishing a stand-alone Blackest Night type series. Instead of a million crossovers or spin-off mini-series, the stories were mostly contained in just the annuals, usually with a pair of "bookend" specials to introduce and conclude the story.
Marvel started the ball rolling in 1988, with the "Evolutionary Wars" story, which ran through their annuals that summer.
They followed in 1989 with the "Atlantis Attacks" storyline:
(Please don't ask what Spidey and She-Hulk mixing it up with the Abomination had to do with Atlantis...it's very complicated).Marvel apparently had enough of line-wide crossovers, so for the next few years they sort of "grouped" their annuals, with 4 or 5 "teamed-up" to present one storyline, whle the other annuals did their thing. So we had stories likes "Days Of Future Present" that ran through the Fantastic Four and X-Annuals:
Or the "Vibranium Vendetta":
Or "The Return Of The Defenders":
After 1992, Marvel dropped the crossover annuals, and they became stand-alones again...except for 1998, when everyone had odd, joint "team-up" annuals:
By 2001, Marvel annuals were done.DC stuck with the "theme" idea longer than Marvel. It started in 1991, with the "Armageddon: 2001" story:
(Spoiler Alert: that Armageddon never happened. Phew...)They followed in 1992 with the storyline in which everybody gave into temptation, "Eclipso: The Darkness Within."
1993 featured the lameness of space parasites inadvertently creating a whole bunch of new heroes, "Bloodlines":
(I chose to picture that one, because everybody loooves Jamm so much).After that DC got away from line-wide storylines, and chose instead to have all of a given year's annuals follow a set theme. In 1994, it was Elseworlds stories:
In 1995, DC featured "Year One" stories of their heroes:
1996 brought "Legends of the Dead Earth," stories set far, far in the future, after Earth was gone but the legacies of our heroes still influenced things:
1997 shifted to "Pulp Heroes":
1998 focused on tales of a supernatural bent, "Ghosts":
Hey, look--Nekron!!1999 featured the famous, soon-to-be-ripped-off-by-Marvel JLApe:
In 2000, DC once again tried to force feed...err, introduce a plethora of new heroes, with "Planet DC," which featured various foreign heroes cavorting with the name heroes. (Planet DC is more snarkily known as "Bloodlones Mark II" for it's largely unsuccessful attempt to mass create new heroes for the DC Universe):
At the risk of offending any Argentinian readers, I refrain from Evita jokes here...2000 was DC's last gasp for annuals.
Nowadays the annuals seem to be, slowly, creeping back into vogue. Sometimes they're just a place to dump late stories, or inventory stories; sometimes a place to stick an origin story, or introduce a new character (like this month's Batman/Detective annuals).
But this sporadic, hot-or-miss, whenever-we-feel-like-it-but-some-years-we-don't schedule sort of defeats the purpose of calling it an "annual." So come on, DC and Marvel--let's commit. If you want to publish annuals, do it annually.
And I thought that using annuals for crossover events or themes was kind of cool. Much cooler than making me buy 3 issues of slow-paced Black Night: Batman. So don't be afraid to try that, OK?
6 comments:
What I thought was really weird was the fact that Action Comics didn't have an annual until 1987. Sure, there had been a plethora of Specials and such before, but no annual. Hell, even DC's Star Trek had annuals before Action.
A great recapitulation of the different events and themes of the old-style annuals, I really enjoyed this.
But I was a bit surprised you consider the first appearance of the Sinister Six a "special event" - on the face of it, it seems no more special to me than the first appearance of the Frightful Four (which did not happen in an annual). But one can probably say that back in the 1960s despite there being quite a few annuals which told "un-special" stories (not to mention quite a bit of reprinted material), the percentage of stories that can be considered special by any stretch of the imagination was higher. In 1968 you had the birth of Franklin Richards (IIRC the first time a Marvel superheroine gave birth) in FF Annual #6 and the story of Peter Parker's parents in ASM Annual #5.
Of course in later years it did become a little harder to come up with stories that you could call special because by now a lot of stuff had already been done, and of course there now were also the divisible-by-50 and divisible-by-100 issues (and in the 1970s the Giant-Size issues) to consider. Hmm, what annuals from later years would I consider "special"? A possible list: Defenders Annual #1 (1976, big finale to the long-running Celestial Mind Control/Headmen saga, a really weird Steve Gerber trip), UXM Annual #4 (1980, the X-Men go to hell, Nightcrawler's origin), Avengers Annual #10 (1981, setting Avengers #200 on its ear, introduction of Rogue), ASM Annual #16 (1982, intro Captain Marvel II (later Photon), special if only it really had nothing to do with what happened in ASM at the time), the Asgardian War of 1985 (New Mutants Special #1 (was to have been an annual, but became too big) and UXM Annual #9). By now weddings had become commonplace (1984 had two in annuals, Black Bolt and Medusa in FF Annual #18 and J. Jonah Jameson and Marla Madison in ASM Annual #18), but the wedding of Marvel's premier solo superhero in ASM Annual #21 (1987) was clearly in a different league...
De--as I said, DC was very sporadic with their annuals, and didn't really start publishing them on a regular basis until the mid-late 80s.
Mensh--good point about "special issues" stealing the thunder from annuals.
Other "important" annuals: Avengers Annual #7/Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2 (letting Jim Starlin conclude his Adam Warlock/Thanos story); Amazing Spider-man Annuals #14 & 15, featuring awesome Denny O'Neill/Frank Miller stories (Spidey & Doc Strange vs. Dormammu & Dr. Doom? Spidey & the Punisher vs. Doc Ock?); Thor Annual #7 (part of the Thor/Eternals epic).
Mensh--oh, and the Sinister Six would kick the Frightful Four's asses...
Snell, why is DC so taken with apes?
Maybe the Sinister Six could kick the Frightful Four's asses, but only if they worked as a team, which they manifestly failed to do in their first appearance. As a matter of fact, I'd say that the Frightful Four, or to be more precise their core three, are a more credible threat together than isolation (the Sandman is really the only one among them with a still-extant rep as a menace on his own). In contrast, the team-up of the Sinister Six really diminished them as individuals - normally Spider-Man would take at least one full issue to take one of them down, here he puts all six of them behind bars in the space of one slightly longer story with very little space devoted to the individual fights.
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