HOW CAN I PERSUADE YOU TO READ THIS POST?

Copyright relevant owner

Acquired recently (and inexpensively) via an online charity shop auction, The Persuaders Annual for 1973 (issued in '72) is a book I don't recall previously knowing about - unless I've just forgotten seeing it advertised way back when.  It'll go nicely with my Persuaders Holiday Special issued a few months earlier (and which I did know about and bought at the time), and is a nice souvenir of the TV Show which never managed to make it to a second series despite the calibre of its stars.

Interestingly, one of the three comic strips (the rest of the contents being a mixture of illustrated text stories and features), entitled 'Avalanche', is a sort of alternate version of a story that appeared in the Special, called 'Slippery Characters'.  It's the same plot, but with different names for the baddies, and it's almost as if the same script was accidentally given to two different artists to draw; then when the mistake was realised, the script was reworked to make the similarities less obvious so that it could be used for future publication.

Or maybe the writer pulled a 'fast one' and reused the same plot - something Terry Nation, who wrote for the show, was known to do (reusing old Saint stories for The Baron), so maybe he was responsible for penning the strips in this book too (or this one at least).  I'd show you a comparison if the spine wasn't too tightly bound to open for scanning without risking splitting it, but if you type 'Danny & Brett - The Persuaders...' into my blog's search box, you can see the earlier version of the story.

If anyone has this Annual, can they check and tell me what the interior endpapers are at the back of the book and tell me how many pages it has in all?  The front endpapers are a double-page spread, whereas the back ones in my copy are two separate pictures, so I just want to make sure there are no missing pages.  I think it's complete, but would appreciate some confirmation.

And hey - wasn't John Barry's theme tune for the show brilliant, eh?

Posted in: Cartoons