The Comics Rack

Summer Thoughts 1

   With the last days of August upon us (at least as I'm writing this) some random comic thoughts that have been floating through my brain:
   I was leafing through the Previews catalog and felt that something was missing. Took me awhile to put my finger on it and then it hit me: there wer no special books released this past summer. I'm not talking about an Absolute edition of this or the start of a major crossover event...no, I'm talking about big, thick summertime comics.
   As far back as I can remember, I've always seen special issues released for summer reading, starting with the Dell Disney specials of my childhood, moving up through the DC 80 page Giants and then into the Marvel and DC Annuals and King-Size Specials. The Disney comics were specifically targeted at summer reading and had games and puzzles along with short stories that were usually tied together by a framing sequence of some sort. The one I recall the most had something to do with Disneyland (no surprise) and had Scrooge and the gang on the cover (I think it may have been Vacation in Disneyland). Over the years, I've found other specials and giants from Dell and find that regardless of the character, each issue is just chock full of fun stuff.
   The next step up were the 80 Page Giants from DC. Even though they were a quarter (*gasp!*), they were worth it because they were big and thick. So what if they were filled with reprints, we didn't know the difference...all we knew was that there were a whole bunch of stories in each Giant. I still have many of the 80 Pagers from my youth and consider them the centerpiece of my collection, not so much due to the quality, but the quantity. After all, a big thick comic that contains 8 or 10 stories takes a lot longer to read than the 5 minute trip through most comics of today.
   In the late 60s, Marvel decided to raise the bar for summer reading and began to publish their King-Size Specials that contained an ALL NEW story with some selected reprints. Talk about a quick trip to ecstasy (and all for a quarter, just like the 80 Pagers). We usually bought the offerings from both companies, just because.
   As the years went by, the concept of the Annual became more refined and became a special event worth anticipating. Usually, it would be a special story done by the best writer with the best penciller and best inker and you felt, even though the price was higher and the page count lower than in the past, that you were getting something...well, special.
   By the mid 80s, things began to change. The summer ritual of the Annual began to change. No longer was it one long story, it was any number of stories: usually one normal length story with 2 or 3 back-ups. The problem was that we slowly got the idea that the Annual was filler. Why? Well, the lead story might be by someone you knew, but sometimes that was not the case. Often it might be a name writer with unknown penciller and inker, or unknown writer with name penciller and unknown inker, or...(you get the idea) and the back-ups were often by total unknowns. Sales on the Annuals began to drop as a result and then some suit came up with a way to bring the numbers back up: some or all of the Annuals would be tied together with one honking long storyline, so we would have to buy all of them to follow the story, regardless of who wrote, pencilled or inked each part. Nice idea, but, if you notice what's out there today, the Annual, for all intents and purposes, is dead and, to paraphrase Carl Denham, "It was greed that killed the Annual."
   Today, there's just odds and ends floating around. Gemstone has tried to release reprints of the Disney specials of old, but they've made the mistake of changing the contents from what they were originally and are charging more than I'm willing to pay for a partial reprint. DC has, far as I can tell, abandoned the Annual and is banking on their new crossovers and events to carry them through the summer months. And Marvel has some Annuals coming out from their quirky "Ultimate" universe, but the regular Marvel universe is Annual-less, except for a Wolverine Annual which is due out in...October?
   As with many things, the specialness of the Annual is gone and the long, slow days of summer can only be filled with treasured issues from the past.