Treasury of British Comics Annual 2025

by Paul Grist, Ian Rimmer, Leo Baxendale (illustrator)

Due to popular demand, Rebellion are celebrating the holiday season with another thrill-packed Treasury of British Comics Annual!

We have delved in the IPC/Fleetway archive to bring you a selection of some of the greatest strips ever to appear in British comics, specials and annuals, from such esteemed titles as, Scream!, Battle, Tiger, Valiant and Lion.

This collection features three brand new stories from industry superstars including Simon Furman and Mike Collins on Kelly's Eye vs The White Eyes, Alec Worley and Anna Morozova on Black Beth and Paul Grist and Simon Williams on Robot Archie.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 6, 2024

About the author

Paul Grist is a British comic book creator, noted for his hard-boiled police series Kane and his unorthodox superhero series Jack Staff.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

I was in two minds about getting this, part of it an undercurrent of resentment at being asked to pay for a sampler, rather than getting big satisfying chunks of a given strip as per regular Treasury publications. Which doesn't really make sense when I'm perfectly happy to buy multi-author prose anthologies without a trace of the same annoyance – at least, so long as I don't already have the specific stories, and at most there's only one here I do. So putting that to one side, yeah, it's good to have these characters restored to something like their anthology origins, and more so, the collection being gathered from an archive that stretches from the innocent likes of Buster, Lion and Wham! to the post-2000AD edge of Scream!. Which is to say, the laconic ultraviolence of Major Eazy is still fun in a whole volume of Major Eazy, but it's unlikely I'll ever read all of them, and it hits much harder as one shot in between lighter strips. And, considered as a sampler, better to get one story of insufferable mystic boob Adam Eterno here than get a collection out of the library and, knowing myself, labour through at least a third of it before having the sense to quit.

Then too, there are a couple of full serials here, where it's hard to know where else they'd have been collected. Gorilla Island cones across like a Planet Of The Apes knock-off to rival Hookjaw's blatant Jaws steal, except that it predates the film by a couple of years, which leaves me a little worried that the wicked chimp Captain and his brutish legions might simply be a fevered response to the end of empire in Africa. Although whatever its political implications, it does still have gorillas with bazookas. Stryker, on the other hand, is an absolute gem, and something I'd probably never have read in any other context, given it's about football. Feeling like The Damned Utd redone as a boys' adventure comic by way of The Professionals, it follows a mysterious player* with a foot like a traction engine, rendered largely immune to clogging by the steel plate in his leg, and prepared to go to any lengths necessary to investigate the fitting-up and death of a promising young player. Hell, half the time he doesn't even need to go to the lengths he does, but it's the seventies, so basically the choice for men is glittery eyeshadow or kicking in doors rather than knocking.

The three new strips, on the other hand, do feel like faint emulations of bygone glories; even the Black Beth story lacks the evocative DaNi art that had been making her recent revival sing. And doing the collection in hardback does mean paying over the odds for a hundred-odd pages, just to get the nostalgia kick of something that has the feel of a proper annual in your hands. But hell, it's nearly Christmas, aren't we all spending plenty already on trying to chase the feeling of a happier yesteryear that may never even have happened? And most of it doesn't even get you a John Smith/John Burns story about rampaging killer dough.

*If your age is in double figures, it's clear from the off that he's the dead boy's brother, but nobody in the story seems capable of working that out.

[Sloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The new strips are the worst part of it (yay, Kelly's Eye vs White Eyes! If I were 70 years old I would be over the moon, but nobody else has read it, and those are not characters Treasury has reprinted, so it's a bizarre choice), but ony Black Beth really sucks, especially with abysmal Morozova taking over from brilliant DaNi on art. Great fun all around, with Stryker a particular gem of old school silly Tom Tully

[Calvin Daniels · Rating 2 out of 5]

Varied shorts of which none sadly excited at all