I realized today we're halfway through summer, and that brought to mind that when I was a kid during the Silver Age, summer meant Marvel annuals! I didn't become a Marvel fan until a couple of years after they started, but you can believe I caught up as soon as I could find places that sold back issues. Bonus: marvel annuals were mostly new material, unlike DC's annuals, but at that time everything was new to me.
Not counting Millie the Model and the first Strange Tales annuals, the first real "Marvel" annual was Fantastic Four Annual #1 in 1963. Sub-Mariner invades the surface world with his army, plus Spider-Man as a backup guest star. Wow!
Also that year, we got the second and last Strange Tales Annual, featuring a short Human Torch vs. Spider-Man story along with a bunch of short mystery reprints. This was a great way to promote both then-new character strips and built up the rivalry between the two.
That was a great start, and 1964 was even better with FF Annual #2 featuring the origin of Doctor Doom and a second story vs. the FF.
The FF was joined in 1964 by the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual featuring The Sinister Six, one of my favorite Spidey stories.
1964 also brought us Marvel Tales Annual #1, featuring wonderful reprints of character origins and first appearances to help us late-comers catch up.
That was a great couple of years, but there was more to come. More on those later.
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Oh, to have been a little older and buying comics back then! The classicFF Annual #1 & #2 annuals plus the Sinister Six story from the spidey annual are priceless. Fans continued to refer to those stories as high water marks for years. And, the story with Dr. Doom not only was essential Doom's continuity, but also bridged his "death" in FF #23 and his "return" in FF #39 to plague both the FF and DD!
It was my luck to miss all this, and not start paying attention to annuals until after FF annual #4...which I skimmed on the newstand, but didn't understand. I knew there was a golden age Torch, due to Marvel's Fantasy Masterpiece reprints...and I had a used copy of FF #25 which was reprinted inside...I didn't catch that it had #26, which I was missing, cause it wasn't shown on the cover! So, I bought FF #57 and 58 and ignored this pricey oversized book that didn't seem to fit with current continuity. (I was so confused to see the Hulk/Thing fight reprinted that I had the impression that all the issues remained in print somewhere... much like the Hardy Boys or Nancy drew books.)
To this day, I kick myself for not buying FF Annual #4 when I had the chance....since it goes on to become such a seminial story for both the FF, Avengers, Vision, Torch and much of the later 60s silver age stories.
It occurs to me that I have never seen a Millie the Model annual...and other than the second Strange Tales annual, I've never seen the first one. Is it significant?
When looking more closely at that second Strange Tales annual, it pits Spider-Man vs the Human Torch. But two things jump out at me. First, how is the torch, who is in full flame-on mode, supposed to be held in the spider's web? (He'd burn his way out in a second!) Second, notice how threatening Spider-Man is... not drawn by Ditko, is this a Jack Kirby figure? And look how wide his arms are stretched... he looks more like morbius the vampire in that pose than he looks like Spidey. (And, look at those funky, multi-colored letters in the masthead. Have you ever seen that before?)
This must have been very early in the spider-man run.
According to DC Indexes it came out the same month as Amazing Spider-Man #4 (and before Fantastic Four Annual #1, which came out the next month). Nick Caputo blogged on the cover here.
Those were very cool Annuals because of the new stories that had more space for the adventure. The Sinister Six one in particular was memorable for the way Ditko drew a full-page panel of Spidey beating each villain individually. It was a really great way to take advantage of the extra space in the Annual. It may have been done to save him having to draw so many pages, but it also used the layout in a way they never could in a regular issue.
Of course, Marvel didn't have many reprints to dig into then, and its full-length stories didn't give them much leeway in fitting them into Annuals. So for awhile, they didn't have much choice but to use new material, unless they wanted to pull out the pre-FF stories, as they did in SA #1, which seldom gets mentioned for that very reason.
I have to admit, being more of a DC fan in the early days, if only because there was so much more out there and they were easier to find, I loved the 80-Page Giants. They had SO many stories I'd never seen before, indicating a huge inventory of stuff out there before I came along. It was hard to beat that value, even if the stories couldn't compare to FF or ASM Annuals #1.
--MSA
People STILL speak reverently about that first FF annual, as if the Submariner never invaded the surface world before...or since.
Marvel's Silver Age Annuals were EVENTS to be savored and treasured. Important things happened there. Growing up during the Bronze Age, I felt that the (then) current annuals, while longer, weren't always better. There were exceptions of course like the Warlock crossovers.
The Marvel hype machine was doing their job well, as far as I was concerned. It was impressed upon me that Spider-Man was an up-and-coming star well before I got my hands on my first Spider-Man comic, owing to the fact that I'd seen him guest-star in Strange Tales Annual, The Avengers and Tales To Astonish.
Kirk G said:
I found that the silver age annuals began to get watered down... that is, while the FF resisted an invasion by Namor in the first annual, and fended off DD's worst assault in the second (we also got to know his detailed background in #2), by three, we had the wedding of the decade, and four brought back a golden age hero as villian, so briefly (but then later on, turned out to be a seminal event).
By five and six, we're looking at a birth of a child, but also the introduction of some ridiculous villian named Annilius, a looser...and six, well, six is really a romp for the inhumans and the black panther...and Ben & Johnny don't show up until the ending. And even then, they loose the villian!
The Daredevil annual felt like a poor imitation of Spidey's Sinister Six annual.
I must have missed Spidey Annual #4 when it came out, cause I would have bought it for the Torch, but it didn't seem terribly important to have Wizard and Mysterio team up... That's an unlikely pairing...unless you think back to the early Tales of Suspense Human Torch days... I didn't consider the Wizard to be a torch villian as much as an evil FF leader and Fantastic Four villian... that's where I had encountered him ever since FF #36.
And as a kid, Spidey annual #5, revealing Peter's Parent's fate really impressed me at the time... but now, seems entirely contrived and forced. I mean, really, the Red Skull? (SPOILER!)
The Hulk annual #1 was all original with the Hulk meeting the Inhumans, and while the cover was legendary, the content was pretty poor artwork, as far as I'm concerned. Who drew that? Yuck!
Avengers Annual #1 has already been discussed, and while it may have been patterned after the JLA in the past, IT JUST DIDN"T MAKE SENSE.
But by comparison, Annual #2 was a riot... perfectly seamed up against Avengers #56, a logical outflow, and able to be ignored if you didn't buy it, this was the penultimate alternative timeline world where the new avengers could meet and fight the original Avengers... plus, a thoroughly forgetable villian, The Scarlett Centurian, should have instead been played by Kang himself, in a bid to go back earlier than his first appearance in the Avengers #8 and stop them in their tracks.
I don't recall any other major annuals, myself, but I do remember the last Sgt. Fury annual that I thought took them into Viet Nam, and felt like an end to the series.
Does anyone have a master list of the annuals that had original material in them?
I should have saved that last comment for the next in your series, Marvel Summer Annuals 1967-68, I guess. Sorry.