Brown Watson Annuals

(* I hope you'll give a big New Year's "welcome back" to Jeremy Briggs who kicks off 2008 with a piece on...)

Brown Watson Annuals

The recent article by my Down The Tubes cohorts, John Freeman and Ian Wheeler, in Comics International on the subject of the TV Avengers and New Avengers in comics and which included a mention of the John Bolton art in the New Avengers Annuals published by Brown Watson, reminded me of something that Dez Skinn said over on the Quality Yahoo group. For those of you not in that group, Dez can often be encouraged by the group (or an approaching deadline) to reminisce a little. I have taken the liberty of copying one such reminiscence here (the time period is the mid-Seventies):

"At the same time as the final days of the Babanis at Brown Watson, I was one floor below merrily producing MAD, House of Hammer and the Williams fortnightly Tarzan, Korak and Laurel & Hardy. So I knew them; Brian, Peter and John. In fact I poached John Bolton from them (insisting he learned to ink his work as I wasn't up for printing pencil art!) and they poached Brian Lewis from me."

So knowing how John Bolton got his break into House Of Hammer magazine and that Brian Lewis must have produced some of his final art for Brown Watson before he died in 1978, I started to take another look at Brown Watson annuals when I came across them. They are easy to spot as they always had "Brown Watson" in large letters at the bottom of the printed spine, which was normally black or red and which wrapped around a little onto both the front and back covers. This spine bleed onto the covers gives them a slightly old-fashioned look harking back as it does to the 1950s Eagle or Buffalo Bill style of annual with their cloth spines.

Brown Watson started publishing TV tie-in annuals around 1974 (although they did the Tarzan comic annual copyrighted 1972 having taken over the rights from World Distributors), and I'm sure that plenty of their annuals will have nothing of interest in them. However others are quite a different matter. The Kung Fu annual dated 1974 states that it was written by Steve Moore who worked on Action and 2000AD amongst others, with picture strip illustrations by Desmond Walduck who was one of the original 1950's Eagle Dan Dare artists.

Most of the annuals are less forthcoming with credits but a quick trawl has unearthed black & white and colour strips and text illustrations by John Bolton, Brian Lewis, Ian Gibson, Oliver Frey and David Lloyd. Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run, The New Avengers, The Bionic Woman, The Sweeney -- you may smile at some of the titles of these annuals now but once you get over that the artwork makes them more than worth looking at. What is more, the artists were even allowed to sign their work.

Here we have Ian Gibson on the Bionic Woman drawing his unique style of robots around the same time that Robohunter started in 2000AD. The New Avengers has Dracula and the young Joanna Lumley in sweeping John Bolton art. Brian Lewis used his black and white House of Hammer art style on The Sweeney (surely an odd choice of subject for a children's annual). On Planet of the Apes it is mainly John Bolton again, but with also a single colour Oliver Frey strip, all based on the TV version of the Apes saga.

My personal favourites however are the colour strips and text illustrations by David Lloyd from the TV version of Logan's Run. I never saw the Logan's Run TV series in the 1970s and so was pleased when it appeared recently on the Sci-Fi channel. While the novelty of watching the episodes, and Heather Menzies in a very short dress, wore off rather quickly since the series really isn't that good, the novelty of the art in the annual remains as it shows Lloyd's art in all its Nightraven and V For Vendetta glory.

I am sure that there are more Brown Watson annuals of interest out there. Use the comment button below if you can add anything to the list. For instance they published the earliest of The Professionals and The Muppet Show annuals. Could Brian Lewis have used his humour style of art on Kermit and Fozzie Bear? Who knows, there might be a few more gems out there.