After the Robo Machines comic was dropped from the pages of Eagle in July 1985, the property was hurriedly licensed to World Distributors, a company with a good record of turning out annuals for the lucrative British Christmas market on a very small budget. They had a volume ready for Christmas 1985 (annuals generally came out in late autumn of the year before they were dated), and presumably it sold pretty well, as another followed in Autumn 1986.

The annuals contained text stories, quiz pages and ever-so-slightly irrelevant factual pages about cars, lasers and space. The stories more-or-less followed the continuity of the cartoon series rather than the Eagle strip, and are thus pretty diabolical. That the same art of Leader-1 ends up on both covers sets the tone.

At some point I'll scan the whole lot, but for now here's a taster story from each volume. I'd be lying if I said they're worth reading.

Robo Machine featuring the Challenge of the Gobots Annual 1986

"Battle of the Beams" was picked arbitrarily due to BuggyMan being named as The Buggyman raising a smile, and there's a brief rundown of who designed the Volkswagen Beetle, picked because the art, while not good, looks to have taken someone a good quarter of an hour, which is more than was put in on the rest of it put together. It also shows you the sort of features World padded these things out with.

Robo Machine featuring the Challenge of the Gobots Annual 1987

With a year's experience under their belt, World had the chance to do a much better job with their second Gobot annual, issued in Autumn 1986. Aside from a very slight increase in the quality of the art, the chance really wasn't taken, and we have the same mix of text stories (all very bad, with frequent misidentification of characters making them frustrating to follow at times, despite their simplistic nature, and a few 'fun' pages. The text story "Battle at the End of the World" is the best of a very bad bunch, and a God-awful joke page that shows you just how much effort was put into this thing.