A 1984 Annual Gallery

Let's look at 1984, not the novel by George Orwell but the selection of annuals Fleetway had on the shelves. We'll start with this advertisement from Whoopee from October 1983.

Yes - in just the humour section Fleetway released eleven different annuals, many for comics that hadn't been around for several years! They each came at one of two prices - £1.95 or £2.50, meaning that if you wanted all of them you had to separate with £24.75! Phew!

I don't own the Whoopee, Buster or Shiver and Shake annuals but I do all the others, and I've managed to find the scans of ones I'm missing so links are at the bottom of the post.

I could be wrong about this but it looks to me as though Mike Lacey illustrated almost all the covers here, so he must have had a heavy workload over the summer.

And of course, these weren't the only annuals for 1984 as there were also some for Fleetway's adventure titles and D.C Thomson also published their regular annuals. Here are the covers to the Beano and Dandy books for 1984 and unlike the Fleetway annuals these had different pictures on the front and back covers.

It's amazing to see that there was so many annuals on the stalls every year back then but hardly any today. You can currently buy The Beano, The Dandy, Broons/Oor Wullie (alternate years) and the combined books though, so we're not completely drained of annuals just yet. The latest D.C Thomson annuals are on sale right now - so be sure to pick them up for Christmas!

Links:

Whoopee: http://www.comicvine.com/whoopee-annual-1984/4000-389020/

Buster: http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/annuals.php?ComicTitleID=34

Shiver and Shake: http://kazoop.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/1984-shiver-shake-annual.html