01/12/2025

We live in fast-moving, impermanent times when much of our documentation, entertainment, art and culture is online or digitised or streamed through an app, and we don’t usually own anything tangible as a record of it, like an object. Most of us don’t even possess physical artefacts like CDs or DVDs anymore. Or indeed the devices to play them on.

Then you add the other instabilities that threaten our modern lives: that a hacker or a solar flare or a radioactive pulse might wipe out all the computerised information we store about our civilisation and leave nothing behind to remind us of it.

And that’s before there’s any mention of the looming menace of an AI takeover, which may cause all our heritage and culture to be erased from the digital archives and replaced with rewrites and revisions, which our new AI overlords deem more acceptable to their robotic sensibilities; where Vikings will be portrayed as metallic-hued robots (with tinny voices) on history programmes and where Shakespeare plays, TV adverts depicting families, and even episodes of ‘Bridgerton’ may be exclusively populated by representatives of the robot community.

This is when hard-copy books, such as collections of Alex cartoons, will become incredibly significant and valuable to our beleaguered descendants, as they huddle in their survivalist communes underground among the shattered remnants of our long-since-gone way of life, when they’ll need to remember how humans were in charge themselves once. And also may need a bit of a giggle.

So, if that’s not a good enough reason to buy an actual hard-backed, paper-paged copy of the latest Alex annual, we don’t know what is. But, if you require further persuasion, we should remind you that the latest book of Alex cartoons - “The Last of Alex 2025” - is available now. It contains the final examples of the Alex strip ever to be printed in the Telegraph, including the storyline in which Alex was suddenly whisked out of our reality by a representative from Simulation HQ.

There’s also a 20-page illustrated feature (which will not be online) charting the lives of all the main characters from the strip after Alex’s disappearance, now and going into the future (including the AI take-over and Robot Uprising). Additionally a short 3-page graphic novel-style story about Alex after his abduction (again exclusively on the pages of the book), kindly sponsored by Buck’s (aka Buff’s) Club.

So please invest now wisely in something with lasting value and be part of preserving human civilisation for future generations. History will thank you.