To everyone on Spaceship Earth.

As per Explore Mars, The Infinite Revolution would like to wish a happy holiday season to all of its crew mates on Spaceship Earth.  Let's hope that no one rocks the boat in 2025.

- Sid

...and nice.

"Stick around a long time, you get a sense of what people want."

Santa Claus, Silent Knight Returns

Having done naughty, let's take a look at nice. For readers looking for a more positive (if still somewhat strange) comic book for the holiday season, we offer this year's Silent Night Returns, by writer Jeff Parker and artists Lukas Ketner and Michele Bandini.

 

The Silent Knight of the title is a corrupted Arthurian knight, who has returned from the dead to harvest the life force of humanity so that his master the Hollow Castle can claim sovereignty over the world.

Aided by Santa, his warrior wife Ulah of the Huldulfólk*, and a few other guest stars such as Etrigan the Demon, Mary Marvel, and Robotman, the Justice League defeats the Silent Knight and restores life to all the afflicted, just in time for Christmas.  The story ends with Superman and Batman presenting Klaus with a Justice League membership card.

To be honest, the story doesn't really come together, and the axe-wielding superhero version of Klaus is a bit unexpected. I can't think of any version of the myth in which Kris Kringle is a warrior king, and as such, his brief stint filling in for Batman in Gotham felt a bit out of place.** (Not to mention his wife Ulah, who is a LONG way from the Mrs. Claus that we're all familiar with.) Regardless, I acknowledge that if you're writing a comic book, you want to have heroes, and Klaus does manage to balance out combat with compassion, and a happy ending to a Christmas story is all you really need.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

- Sid

* The internet suggests that this should be Huldufólk rather than Huldulfólk.

** Although, full points for the classic Frank Miller Batman-and-Robin homage.

Naughty...

For readers on the Naughty list, we recommend a re-read of the 1992 Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special from DC, featuring intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo - the last Czarnian. (Unlike Superman and Krypton, Lobo was the last of his species because he killed all of his fellow Czarnians when he was 17*.)  

For readers with the good fortune of being unfamiliar with Lobo, he first appeared in Issue 3 of Omega Men as a villain in 1983, but was retconned into a very different character in the early 1990s.  The brutal, violent, crass, over-the-top version of Lobo was originally intended as a parody of anti-hero characters like Wolverine, but as is sometimes the case, the parody became its own new normal, and Lobo ended up as one of DC's most popular characters during the 1990s. 

The Paramilitary Christmas Special, written by Keith Giffen and Alan Grant and illustrated by Simon Bisley, stands as a representative Lobo adventure.  Hired by the Easter Bunny to kill Santa Claus, Lobo carves a bloody path through St. Nick's army of elves, after which he duels an equally brutal Santa with knifes, eventually cutting off his head.  

Now in control of the North Pole, its factories, and its comprehensive Naughty and Nice lists, Lobo converts the toy factories to bomb production, and circles the world dropping explosives rather than presents.

And a merry fraggin' Christmas to all.

- Sid 

* Well, strictly speaking, he killed half of them when he was 16 and the other half after he turned 17.