Them's the vagaries

Two whole years ago I started a "thing" that involved looking at some of my favourite annuals from over the years (because it was December, and annuals are "traditionally" given/received at Christmas). Like most things in life, I didn't get anywhere near finishing it, but 'tis the season and all that so here's another entry. One from my ninth Christmas now, it's Zig and Zag: The Killer Official Annual from Outer Space!

You'll have to excuse the image quality here - all my scanner settings got reset after Windows 10 was installed, and I've only just figured them out again AFTER I'd scanned in this lot, so... apologies for that? Still worth a gander though.


In 1994 and 1995, I was fairly obsessed with Zig and Zag - on Irish screens since the 1980s but introduced to the rest of us via Channel 4's The Big Breakfast (for those that don't know). A couple of daft aliens from the planet Zog, they of course had their own comic besides all the other usual merchandise (collectable cards, toys, T-shirt, jelly-based drinks and so on) - Zig and Zag's Zogozine has been "looked at" more than once on this blog (see here, here and here). Three Zig and Zag-based books were published in 1994, but this "official annual" thing is the one that most resembled the Zogazine, composed mostly by the same folk behind the comic - Kev Sutherland and John Moore. 

You get FOUR four-page comics in this thing, all drawn by John Moore and written by Kev Sutherland - here's exactly half of them:

This page, along with this one, would seemingly forever influence how I'd draw haunted castles. Just saying.

Mr. Sutherland does several "activity pages" too - there's a guide to attaching shelves to yourselves, a board game, a puppet theatre, a puzzle page and these two things:

Plus plenty of the "stuff" that made Zig and Zag so famous initially, that being their celebrity encounters - here's two of them:

Also included are Marky Mark, Lenny Henry, Dean Saunders, Steve Backley, Michaela Strachan, Jerry Hall, Antonia De Sanches, Girlfriend (a girl band, I don't remember them?), Aerosmith, John McCririckickickick, Todd Carty, Susan Tully, Michelle Gayle, Danni Minogue, Richard Wilson, Bob Geldof and Robin Day... So if you're the type that has any interest in any of that lot, you might want to consider trying to find this book.

Altogether, along with 1994's Beano and Buster annuals I was a happy chappy that Christmas. More annual fun some other time (maybe), if you're that way inclined you might want to see the other entries in this "series"... the third Willy The Kid Book, Russ Abbot's Fun Book, the 1989 Real Ghostbusters annual, a 2000 AD annual and a daft Marvel thing.

BONUS BIT:

As previously mentioned, this wasn't the only book that Zig and Zag "had out" in 1994 - there was also Zig and Zag's Big Sexy Book and Zig and Zag In Yer Face, the latter of which contained these two pages that I couldn't NOT show to all and sundry...