Your Perfect Christmas Present? ‘Treasury Of British Comics Annual 2025’ Gives You A Whole Load Of Classic Brit Comics

by Richard Bruton

The classic British Christmas gift of an annual under the Christmas tree returns – packed with classic Brit comics – time for an extended preview…

Covers by David Roach (left) & Andreas Butzbach (right – Treasury of British Comics webshop-exclusive)

It’s been a while, but it’s damn good to have them back. Yes, the annual annual was a fixture of Brit kids’ Christmas excitement every Christmas morning, something for the kids to read whilst mom was making Christmas dinner and dad was off down the pub.

I certainly remember the thrill of getting an annual every Christmas morning, whether it was Beano, Dandy, Buster, something Marvel, or 2000 AD, but there was always something.

This Treasury of British Comics Annual 2025 (annuals are always dated for the year after) follows up the success of the debut Treasury annual last year, giving Rebellion a chance to raid the Treasury archives and fill the annual with a mix of famous classics, lesser-known gems, odd one-off strips, and then add in a few new strips to give folks plenty of reading come Christmas. I mean, you don’t have to save reading it until Christmas Day, but that’s the nostalgic fun of it all.

Now, I’m not even going to suggest this is the thing to enchant kids in this day and age, given that it’s all a big nostalgia fest. But hey, who knows. As a kid, one of my treats for Christmas Day was reading dad’s Giles annual Christmas afternoon once he was done with it and had succumbed to the post Christmas dinner snooze. So hey, if I could find a love of Giles as a pre-teen, there’s going to be some kids there going to find a love of comics from the great stuff in here.

But let’s face it, this is primarily one for the oldies, a glorious bit of nostalgia for those of us either old enough to have enjoyed some of these at the time they were published or those of us who appreciate the talents on show. And there’s certainly a load of talent on display – Mick McMahon, Carlos Ezquerra, Mike Western, Leo Baxendale, Ian Kennedy, John Smith, John Burns, Massimo Belardinelli, Steve Moore, and Eric Bradbury – a real who’s who of classic Brit comics talent.

As for the three brand- new strips, well there’s a lot of great work in those three new strips – Simon Furman and Mike Collins on Kelly’s Eye vs The White Eyes, Paul Grist and Simon Williams with a classic slug-fest in Robot Archie vs The Sludge and Alec Worley and Anna Morozova spinning another bit of perfect sword & sorcery fantasy with Black Beth.

Before we do the preview, let’s just pick out a few highlights for you…

Alec Worley‘s rejuvenation of Black Beth, a character almost no-one apart from Worley knew anything about, continues here with one of the new strips, a typically short and sweet tale of slavers and strange things, all dispatched at the sword of Black Beth. It’s strange at first to see Anna Morozova’s art here instead of Dani’s art, but that’s a momentary thing, and the difference is all stylistic and not quality, Morozova bringing her own thing to Black Beth and making it look great.

Mick McMahon‘s 3000 AD: The Traveller is a one-off thing from a 1980 Dan Dare annual – basically a Future Shock type thing, one lone traveller fighting a brutal battle in his quest… but just what is that quest? McMahon’s art is always, always, no matter what style he’s working in, a treat to see…

And best of all… one of those things that I turned the page to and just took a breath, because this was something that just looked so wonderfully good, so beautifully clean and stylish that I had to double check it wasn’t a brand-new strip. This is exactly the sort of thing that’s great about this Treasury Annual, the unearthing of a lost, unexpected gem. And that’s what I love about it.

Nope, it’s New Neighbours by Ian Rimmer and Mike Western. And it’s just unexpectedly quite wonderful.

Originally published in Scream! Holiday Special 1985, this is that most gloriously surprising of things. Sure, the story of new neighbours who owe an awful lot to the Addams Family, The Munsters, or, published just a couple of years previous, Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse’s quite perfectly weird Bojeffries Saga, is hardly original, albeit it it’s a hell of a lot of silly fun.

No, it’s the Mike Western art that amazed me. I might be completely off here, not knowing all that much about Western, but all the art I’d seen from him till now – at least as far as my memory tells me – has been more action adventure/war story art. Damn brilliant stuff of course, but nothing this… well, just clean and crisp and light and stylised to perfection. Wow. So, so glad I got to see this… and now I can share it with you…

All in all, it’s a big 112-page hardback, available from comic shops and certain massive online merchants from 6 November, with a regular cover by David Roach and a Treasury of British Comics webshop-exclusive cover by Andreas Butzbach – a great looking annual that’s going to make a lot of comic fans very, very happy come Christmas Day.

So, before it’s time for a big, big, big extended preview of just some of what you’ll see inside, here’s the full line-up..