World Distributors The 1978 Annual

Published	1977
SBN	7235 0412 1

Starring the fourth Doctor and Sarah

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 8/3/04

The most throwaway Dr Who Annual ever. Not content with being only 64 pages long, the 1978 annual contained so many filler articles that it only had room for four short stories and two comic strips. (In subsequent years this ratio improved.) It's better than the similarly insubstantial 1976 annual, but still pretty unmemorable. The first short story is good but the other three will leave no impression on your brain - I can hardly remember anything about them now and I just finished reading 'em and taking notes.

That sole good story is The Sleeping Beast, a story so cool that it hardly belongs in a Tom Baker annual. Its aliens are Guerners, looking like a cross between Lord Byron and a Chelonian, and about four foot six tall with a pointed nose and a tortoise-like shell. They're vegetarians but voracious, with one Guerner able to eat an acre of Amazonian jungle into dust in a single day. Unsurprisingly they're nomads, travelling from planet to planet in their incessant search for food. [Apparently a fair sized planet, say fifty times the size of Earth, could not hope to sustain more than three generations of Guerners, though Lord only knows how to count a Guerner generation since the Doctor's friend Smee is at least 23,000 years old. Which might explain their auto-delete memories.]

The Guerners must be among the most distinctive aliens to appear in any Doctor Who story, in any medium. On top of that the story itself is a lot of fun, with a Troughton cameo at the start (no, really!) and a cool twist at the end.

However after that it's dullness as usual for a Tom Baker annual's short stories. There isn't even any entertaining lunacy along the lines of The Sinister Sponge or War on Aquatica. The Doctor doesn't do much. The Sands of Tymus goes in one ear and out the other. A New Life has a heartwarming ending but nothing else worth mentioning, with the chauvinist sniping of the early Tom Baker annuals getting more offensive than usual. The Sea of Faces has a cool SF concept but does almost nothing with it.

There's Paul Crompton, thank goodness, but even he seems to have calmed down by now. He seems almost sane! He's come a long way since 1976, having turned himself into a proper illustrator at last, but the results are arguably less interesting for being more conventional. 'The Rival Robots' is his first black-and-white comic strip to have a grip on visual storytelling, but it's a bit dull. (Bizarrely, his Sarah Jane looks more like Louise Jameson than Liz Sladen.) However his fully painted strip The Traitors must be the most depressing story in any Dr Who annual. It's a strong dramatic piece and I admire it hugely, but I wouldn't want to reread it any time soon.

There's another jokes page (Loony Laffs) with aliens as stupid-looking as the previous year's Out of this World!. This book has one good story and two Paul Crompton comic strips, but little else that's worth your time. If I had to sum it up in one word, that word would be "forgettable". Incidentally I've just noticed parallels between the World Distributors annuals and the comic strips of TV Comic, Countdown, etc. Both went completely loopy in the sixties and had a golden age in Pertwee's time before sinking back into bleah under Tom Baker. Move on folks, there's nothing to see here.