not" and that "the only consistency surrounding the concept of these special sorts of issues is that they have been around in some form or another just about as long as superhero comics have been published". An annual is considered a separate series for purposes of numbering and collectability; a particular periodical's Annual will thus have its own numbering series, or alternately be referred to by the year of its publication. For example, between 1963 and 2012, Fantastic Four has had 33 annuals. When IDW published a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles annual in 2020, it was titled the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Annual 2020. Comic book annuals originally were little more than reprint albums (for example Superman Annual #1, August 1960), representing stories that had first seen publication in their monthly counterparts, but eventually, this changed to annuals featuring primarily all-new material (the first example being Fantastic Four Annual #1, July 1963). Later annuals often featured stories with greater import to the characters featured than in the monthly publications, reflecting the "special" status of their once-yearly publication. Annuals also, on occasion, featured the finale of a multi-issue storyline running in the monthly series; conversely, many annuals would showcase standalone stories that did not fit in with the then-current thrust of the monthly series' storyline. In the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, annuals published by Marvel Comics and DC Comics were usually released in the summer of the year and often had a unifying theme, either a similar theme that individual stories were written around, or a crossover storyline bringing many of the characters in the individual publishers' continuities together for a single overall event. In the case of the "crossover" annuals, the number of characters and annuals involved in a crossover story varied. Some were company-wide, incorporating virtually every character in the publisher's shared universe whose series received an annual edition. Others used smaller groups of characters whose series had some sort of in-story connection, such as series featuring members of teams or "extended families" of characters. Annuals published by DC and particularly Marvel became fewer and far between by the late 1990s, mainly due to the near-collapse of the comic book industry in the wake of the speculator boom; annuals were seen as an unnecessary risk in a climate where many monthly publications were in danger of cancellation for lack of sales (especially at Marvel, which filed