Review by Frank Plowright

It’s gratifying to see the Treasury of British Comics Annual back for a third year, as before combining reprints from the vast repository available to Rebellion with new strips featuring old characters. It once again straddles genres and has extended the remit of the reprints, with fewer choices from the 1960s and more from the 1980s, along with Captain Crucial from 1991.

The selection opens with writers Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence teaming El Mestizo and the more obscure Helmet Head, last seen in late 1960s issues of Tiger. He’s the Sheriff of Coltsville, unlike any conventional Western Sheriff, but loved by the inhabitants. Henrik Sahlström creates the Western atmosphere, but it’s overly sentimental.

That’s the sort of insane concept readers of the 1960s and 1970s took for granted. Others include Dollman and his army of mentally controlled puppet creatures and an alien terrorising a Scottish loch. ‘The Mouse Patrol’ tops them all, though, by having a group of children in charge of a tank during the desert combat of World War II. That’s not fantastic enough, though, so they’re accompanied by a chimpanzee!

Most strips are restricted to six pages at most, but the exception is ‘John Brody and the Green Men’, a 1964 adventure strip clocking in at 22 single page episodes. Willie Patterson managing to fit action and cliffhanger into ten panels per page is as remarkable as Frank Langford’s effort at drawing to that pace (sample art). Brody fights a succession of feral creatures in a hidden land ruled by a tyrant able to control the minds of ordinary men. It’s rocket paced.

Thanks are due to David Roach, who not only writes and draws the whimsical teaming of two magical characters, but also supplies original artwork from his collection. It means the tale of human pirates on an alien planet, the 1970s excess of British agent Dredger and the tale of nature documentary maker Greg Wild are shown as reproductions of the original pages. What it displays is that Francisco Fuentes Man, Horatio Altuna, and Juan Arancio were all confident artists needing few corrections, with Arancio spectacular on jungle scenery, if not realising his lead character is only supposed to have one arm.

Ken Reid (sample art), Martin Baxendale, Mevyn Johnston and the more recent Brett Parson cover the cartooning selections/ It might be imagined that Parson working in the modern era would provide the best art, but although he’s good the earlier artists are far more imaginative, their exaggerations timeless.

Steve White reimagines comedy shark Gums as if starring in the legendarily violent Action comic to good effect, and Suyi Davis Okunbowa obviously has plans for giant robot ape Mytek the Mighty. If a regular series manifests perhaps a different artist would be more suitable as Edison Neo fails to make the most of the opportunity of a giant ape battling a robot python, with stiff figures and little imagination to the layouts.

As enjoyable as so much of this collection is, one wonders how much the old features will resonate with readers under fifty. The book being marketed in a limited run only available (with a choice of covers) through the 2000AD shop or UK comic shops indicates they’re perhaps aware of a limited appeal.

Thanks to Dave Lawrence for correction