MARVEL SUPERHEROES ANNUAL MINI-COVER GALLERY...

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

In 1978, MARVEL Presents The SUPERHEROES Annual (for 1979) appeared on the shelves, published by BROWN WATSON, followed a year later by the 1979 Annual (for 1980), this time published by GRANDREAMS.  This new company had been set up by two of the bosses from Brown Watson after leaving their former place of employment, and they continued to publish Marvel Annuals (as well as others, mostly TV related) for a few years.  I understand that Marvel UK and Grandreams operated from the same building, so it wasn't long before the publisher's name on the spine of Marvel Annuals was revised from Grandreams to Marvel/Grandreams, presumably to better represent the parties involved.

A year after the first Superheroes Annual, Marvel UK introduced a monthly mag called MARVEL SUPERHEROES (not to be confused with the 1975/'76 weekly, The SUPER-HEROES, which lasted for 50 issues), but I don't think it was a tie-in to the Annual.  At least not until 1980, when the third Annual in the series (for 1981) was retitled Marvel Superheroes and bore the same masthead as the monthly periodical.  As far as I know, there were only three 'Superhero' Annuals, though the middle one suffered from poor quality reproduction of the interior strips.  The full-colour pages looked as though they'd been scanned from printed comics, but so too did the spot-colour pages, which was surprising as they'd never been printed in that format anywhere else before.

Also, one story in the first Annual had two pages out of sequence, but the fault belonged Stateside as that's how the strip was published in its original appearance in The MIGHTY THOR #231.  (They should never have abolished these little corner-page numbers.)  Marvel UK revived the name for a few Annuals (I think there were some Specials too) in the late '80s, early '90s, but this time Super Hero was two words (after being hyphenated in the 1987 Omnibus Annual) so I'm not including them here as they're not connected to the original series.  Anyway, for all you nostalgists out there, I thought I'd show you the covers to the first three Annuals, so here they are for your personal perusal.

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