Why did Marvel stop putting our annuals?
 

I know there have been some Ultimates Annuals and there is a new Daredevil Annual coming out, but overall annuals seemed to become a thing of the past around 2001 or so. They just died off. What happened? Personally, when I was a kid collecting comics in the 80s, annuals were a great way to check out other titles I was interested in but didn't read regularly just to see how I might like it.

When I was a kid, it seemed like annuals were a way to have big crossovers. Now we have big crossovers in every issue of every title, I guess annuals became redundant.

I'm guessing you're in your mid-twenties.

Nah, I'm 30. I can remember when annuals were just large sized continuations of the books (which I largely ignored except if it was done by a great artist or featured some landmark like Spidey's wedding), but for the most part I remember the late 80's Marvel annuals like the Evolutionary War, the Serpent Crown, Atlantis Attacks, stuff like that. Then it gradually devolved, in the early 90's you had groups of crossover annuals, and then that one year when both DC and Marvel did annuals introducing new characters. I remember each Marvel one had a card or something. And the only character that came out of it that I remember was Hitman.

Didn't Marvel do 13 issues a year after that? Do they still do that? And then DC started doing miniseries... I remember some JSA (old school JSA, not modern JSA) event, and some Green Lantern tie in where a green lantern would team up with a second tier character in each issue.

Now it seems like if they want a killer creative team to work on a title for an oversized issue, they just make a one-shot or something.

edited to add: Didn't Marvel do separate mini series for stuff like Civil War? Not the Civil War mini itself, I mean the Runaways/Young Avengers Civil War series, the X-men crossover, stuff like that. That way they can milk it into a tpb.

Back in "tha day", annuals were usually self-contained, light, breezy fare released during the summer.

Well, in my "day", anyways..

Those are the annuals I am talking about.

OK, I'm 28, annuals for me seemed like a marketing gimmick with crappy art and crossovers of no importance that required you to buy several books at twice normal cover price. So I don't miss them ;)

Yeah, now we get those every month, LOL...
;)

80 Page Giant. For a quarter. Now that was an annual! :D

Because they don't fit in the golfball hole?

Zing! I started buying comic books on the tail end of what I consider to be really good annuals. For me the annuals of the 90s were an opportunity for the Big 2 to produce some really awful mutlipart storlines. Today, these two are just producing these stories without the "annual" tag.

The multipart story lines always turn me off. I will usually drop a title rather than try to keep up with a multi issue (and multi title) story line. If it's really worth while, the story line will be released in a hard bound collection and I might consider picking up then but not very often.

I agree with this poster.

My understanding was when the comics industry was about to go bust, the majors decided that rather than put out "light, breezy" annuals by their A team & B team writers, that they as a comic company try to come up with an "Event" series whereby by the talents of the entire writing pool could be focused on telling 1 large scale story.

A good read on the history of annuals (and crossovers in general on the rest of the site):

http://www.geocities.com/mbrown123/x...s_history.html

Yet Marvel seems to be bringing the annual back. They have put out annuals in the ultimates line, and they are doing a new Daredevil annual coming up real soon.

They also had some Spidey annuals a month or so ago..

Marvel stopped releasing annuals back when Bill Jemas was in charge.

What happened was, he looked at the sales figures for annuals he noted that they sold fewer copies than their regular titles. So instead of doing he annuals, he had them add another regular issue or two per year to the schedule.