17: The Annual
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
A. E. van Vogt (according to a bunch of quote mining sites, citation needed)
A big book or extra-sized issue of a magazine or comic, or a tie-in for a film or series, an annual is something fun for fans in time to go under the tree at Christmas.
This is a British tradition apparently, US comics sometimes have annuals independently of holiday specials. (I just got the 2000 A.D. annual-ish end-of-year issue yesterday, for example.) It’s an equivalent to the Icelandic tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve.
These vary from thin books with some stories and puzzles aimed squarely at children to huge end-of-the-year publications for older fans - Doctor Who had one of each at one point during the Smith years, after previous years had a standard annual and a Storybook as well - but they generally have short stories, features and the like.
The stories may or may not be canon for a given publication as they come outside the regular run, so they might be designed as non-canonical skits like TV series doing sketches in charity telethons.
Or maybe not - US comic annuals have featured major events and introduced recurring characters, and these days some charity telethon sketches count as canon too. And Sherlock Holmes first appeared in an annual!
So you could have this kind of short scene as part of meeting friends from a game around the period, or do a non-canon special. Or a canon one.
Or go all-out and produce a campaign zine annual, complete with wordsearch!
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