In Hedging Your Bets, I attempt to get up to speed on Sonic the Hedgehog, challenging the odds to hopefully make it all the way to the finish line. This week, here comes a new challenger!
So let's talk for a second about Annuals. The entire point of those things is to give readers more comics, which is something that I think we as comics writers can all get behind as a pretty good idea. The thing is, they've occasionally gotten a bad reputation because "more" doesn't always translate to "good." I've written about it before, about that tricky tightrope that they need to walk just by virtue of being bigger and more expensive comics that exist just slightly outside the main publishing schedule, leading to a tendency to work as weird offshoots rather than as stories that support the ongoing narrative.
But the Annuals that IDW released this week sidestepped that problem neatly. With Jem, it was a matter of embracing that weirdness with a sci-fi take on the Holograms that exists as an in-universe fan-comic. With Ghostbusters Annual 2017, though, they've done it by embracing the concept of More.