The British hardback comic annuals of the 1980s had some of the best colour art of the era, as well as a lot of pages to fill to appeal to the Christmas crowd, so were packed with data pages, reprints and other filler.
Sometimes you'd get a great interview with Brian Bolland, or some unseen art, or something actually useful, like the absolute cracker of a feature in the 1988 2000ad Annual that lists 60 things you probably didn't know about the galaxy's greatest comic.
I knew 55 of these facts, but there was one about overseas sales that got me feeling goddamn patriotic, because it proved that New Zealanders loved their thrillpower. At a time when the comic was selling 100,000 copies every week, 8000 were heading overseas, with 3500 going to New Zealand and a mere 2850 going to Australia.
This meant that in New Zealand - with a population of 3.3 million - was getting one prog for every 938 people in the country. Even with a higher population of 16.5 million at the time, Australia only imported 2850 issues every week, or one for every 5800 people.
Aotearoa still lagged behind Britain, which published enough progs that there was one issue for every 569 people in the United Kingdom, but I always thought 2000ad was drokkin' everywhere when I was growing up, and it turned out I was absolutely right, because we couldn't get enough of the future shock.
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1 comment:
Well, if you were a kid and a SF fan in late-70s early 80s NZ, 2000AD was by far the cheapest and most reliable source - there were only 2 tv channels and there was no guarantee that any US or UK shows would be shown, or that we wouldn't be a year or two behind - and similar with movies, which were about 6 months behind. Books seemed to come on a slowboat from the UK (so the only US SF we got would be if it was also published in the UK) and pre-internet there weren't many ways to know what we were missing out on in any case. 2000AD however, was there every week, even if it was three months behind the UK.
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