The Tearoom of Despair is all about staying on top of modern comic book trends, so of course I'm going to spend the next few weeks writing about 2000ad and Judge Dredd annuals from the 1980s.
The old British hardback annuals are my platonic ideal of the perfect comic, a done-in-one package loaded with great art and stories, in the chunkiest and most durable of formats. They are also full of reprints and filler material, and the best of them are notable for being edited by somebody who deeply cares about giving the kids the best bang for their buck.
The 2000ad annuals do vary wildly in quality, and while there are obvious golden periods like the 1980s, some are most definitely more strotnig than others.
So every day for the next month, I will be ranking all of these annuals against each other, all judged by my own inscrutable standards (spoiler - it's all about the art). Just the 2000ad and Judge Dredd annuals, no Star Lord annual and definitely none of the yearbooks, because they are a whole other level of dire comic.
Sometimes this is easy, the very best and the very worst are blindingly obvious (and the most disappointing are mostly the earliest or latest of the annuals). But there are also four or five years of Dredd annuals that are total Ezquerra lovefests and while this is obviously fantastic, it's really drokking hard to rate one over the other.
But that's what subjective lists are all about. And if all the best things in life can be rated, so can 2000ad annuals.
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