Well, Lew Stringer actually pulled some info together on this a few years ago. The predecessors date back to the 1820s with a children's Christmas book that came out towards the end of the year; it was called, appropriately enough, The Christmas Box. Half a century later, Chatterbox began as a weekly children's paper founded by John Erskine Clarke. Early on, they began also releasing a larger, hardcover version around Christmas and its popularity and longevity helped to solidify the notion as it was tied to a children's periodical.
The first one with comics was The Playbox Annual from 1909 which featured comic strips like Tiger Tim. As comic books came into being and proved popular, comic annuals started to become a staple. The basic idea of an oversized book coming out towards the end of the year was consistent. Essentially, it was a marketing gimmick publishers used to get more money around the holidays, when people were more likely to spend it.
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That's a bit of a guess on my part, though. I'm not sure if publisher were really thinking along those lines back in the 1950s and '60s.
The other possibility that occurs to me is that, since the Christmas timing/theme was originally a British notion, it may well not have translated here in the States. American publishers may have just gotten the "put out one extra issue every year" idea, and not put any though towards what time of the year it should be published.
It's interesting to note, too, that even after starting Annuals, publishers were not always consistent with them. Fantastic Four Annual first came out as a yearly book in 1963, but the were none published in 1972, 1974, 1975, 1982 or 1986. Presumably the lapses in '74 and '75 owed to the Giant-Size FF book that ran as a quarterly magazine for those two years, but I'm at a loss to explain the others. I can maybe see something in the 1980s where regular series creator John Byrne was too busy to do the Annuals himself, and no one felt it was appropriate or was allowed to have another team on the book? But that's a really a guess. And still wouldn't explain 1972.
The notion of multiple Annuals being tied together as a cohesive story dates to the late 1980s, and one could make the argument that was the time when commercialism overtook storytelling; however, it should be reiterated that the very notion of Annuals came about as a blatant form of commercialism that owed more to filling publishers' coffers than providing quality entertainment. We just don't tie it as readily to Christmas any more.
1 comments:
Growing up in the 1960's and 70's I always enjoyed reading these Annuals. Even though the cover price was higher than a regular issue, the extra pages and stories made them a great value and were a treat to read. In this era before reprint editions were commonplace, these Annuals were the only way to read older stories, short of hunting for the original issues themselves.
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