(Just a quick blog this week while I get back into the swing of things.)
I love fried chicken sandwiches. It’s a go-to comfort food for me. The first one I ever ate would have been a McDonald’s chicken sandwich from back in the 80s, when they were introduced. So when I heard McDonald’s had introduced a new item called the Classic Chicken Sandwich, I had to try it.
For my twelfth and final Blog of Christmas, I’m going back to an old favorite: “The Silent Night of the Batman” from February, 1970’s Batman 219, by Mike Friedrich, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano.
Welcome to Day Eleven of my 12 Blogs of Christmas! Today, we’re looking at a comic of more recent vintage: Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s Klaus! This premiered as a seven-issue miniseries a few years ago (collected into a nice book), followed by two annual Christmas specials the last two years. According to interviews that I’ve read, the plan is to do one more single-issue special next year, because the three will make a nice-sized book. Then, Morrison and Mora plan to follow that up with another longer miniseries. Whatever the plan, I’m on board, because I’ve come to love this series.
On today’s Tenth Blog of Christmas, we take a look at Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle. I first became aware of Paul Dini’s work through the Batman animated series, which he script-edited. I loved his episodes, and it was always a treat when he contributed to DC’s Batman Adventures, the comic based on the show. However, it was even more of a treat when his own character—Jingle Belle, Santa’s rebellious teenage daughter—began appearing in stories of her own.
(Apologies for the poor scanning quality. I don't own an electronic version of this book, and it's really pretty thick and hard to scan easily.)
I can’t say for sure what my first Christmas-related comic was. It might have been a big, fat Walt Disney Christmas collection. Or it might just as easily have been a big, treasury-sized edition of Sheldon Mayer’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stories, collected in DC Comics’ Limited Collector’s Edition C-42. Disney Christmas comics are still coming out today from IDW, whereas the Rudolph stories live on mostly in my memories. So I’m going to talk about the Rudolph comics.
Today’s blog features another Christmas novel: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum. Baum is probably best known for the Oz series, which I love. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus displays the same far-reaching imagination as those books. I suppose, in its own way, it’s as all over the place as Hoffman’s Nutcracker and Masefield’s Box of Delights, which shows what I’m looking for in a Christmas story. (I also love Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, though, which has a laser-like focus, so there you go. When you think I’m going to zig, I zag.)
The last holiday movie I plan on writing about this year is Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. And while I support being inclusive of all holidays and not assuming everyone celebrates Christmas—heck, we don’t celebrate a Christian Christmas, so much as we like the music and decorations and trappings, and like being nice to people—I’ve made no secret that these blogs are very much about Christmas things. And I’m not replacing Christmas with “holidays,” because all the things I have picked are very definitely about Christmas. Well, all of them except this one, because this truly is a holiday (or holidays) movie.
My favorite holidays are the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas corridor. I like the dark moodiness of Halloween, plus candy. I like the cozy autumness of Thanksgiving, plus turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and sweet potatoes and pies and EATING. I like lighting the Hanukkah candles and celebrating that part of my heritage. And I like decorating the Christmas tree and exchanging presents with my wife and family and listening to Christmas music and watching Christmas TV shows and movies and reading books and comics and all the holiday eating. So a movie connecting Halloween and Christmas was always going to be right up my alley.
