Christmas With The Superheroes

Fifty years ago this month, I was reading a tabloid-sized comic collection called “Christmas With the Super-Heroes” (aka Limited Collector’s Edition C-34) and in the years since I’ve trotted it out almost as often as I’ve watched Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Published in the comparatively huge dimensions of 10 by 14 inches and emblazoned with a whopping $1 price tag, this book immediately mesmerized 9-year-old me with its beautiful cover by artist Nick Cardy, featuring Santa Claus himself hanging out with Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and the Teen Titans. It would be several years before I noticed Kris Kringle is considerably shorter than even the teenagers in this group shot, but then again he is after all a jolly old elf.

Within are two vintage tales from the 1940s and two more from the 60s, but the fun begins with…well, not exactly the “new” but at least the “recent” in the form of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” reprinted from Batman #239, a comic published a mere two years earlier. In it, Batman discovers a Salvation Army Santa lying face down in the snow, having been assaulted by a thief who emptied his collection bucket. Apparently he’s just the latest in a string of victimized Santas, but this particular St. Nick got his licks in, having cracked his assailant across the knee with a heavy wooden pallet. Sure enough, there’s a trail of blood and footprints consistent with a pronounced limp, so Batman heads off in search of his quarry.

The trail leads to a Christmas tree lot where a battle ensues using the very symbols of the season as weapons, with the whole festive fracas nicely delineated by the art team of Irv Novick and Dick Giordano.

Eventually Batman wins the fight, but the thug pleads extenuating circumstances and Batman, possibly caught up in the spirit of the season, agrees to hear him out. We learn the mugger’s name is Tim, and he introduces Batman to his small niece, Betsy, currently under his care. Tim shares that his heartless boss Mr. Evans recently laid him off from his job at a toy factory, reducing him to a life of crime in order to provide poor little Betsy a Christmas. Batman is having none of this sob story; obviously a big lug like Tim is able-bodied enough to find honest labor, and just because he’s got a beef with his former boss is no reason to take it out on the rest of the world. Alas, Batman’s speech only inspires Tim to seek out the true object of his anger: old man Evans. Tim koshes Batman with a table lamp and leaves him tied to a radiator, heading out on his mission of vengeance. Batman awakens and manages to work his way free, taking little Betsy with him in a desperate race to prevent Tim from committing murder. Blizzard-like road conditions soon make it impossible to continue by car, but miraculously, they spot an unattended horse and sleigh and borrow it to race after Tim. Alas they seem to reach him too late, as he’s carrying the limp form of old man Evans in his arms. As it happens, though, the fellow’s not dead, just sick; Tim has had a change of heart and is trying to get him to medical help.

The story ends at a hospital Emergency Room, where a doctor says Evans will survive, though it’s nothing short of a miracle. Batman fronts Tim enough cash to buy presents and a Christmas dinner for Betsy and promises to speak on Tim’s behalf at his trial after the holidays. Then he leaves the hospital with the intent of returning the horse and sleigh to their owner, only to find…

It’s an atypically religious twist for both Batman and writer Denny O’Neill, but hey it’s Christmas. Interestingly, this may have been my first exposure to a reprint of a story I’d already bought the first time around. The original cover featured a Neal Adams drawing of Batman wearing a Santa beard, carrying a sack of gifts and knocking on a door. That’s the kind of image that sticks with you when you’re 7 years old. And beyond.

The second story turns the clock back much further, indeed all the way back to 1947 for a reprint from Captain Marvel Adventures #69. The Grand Comics Database credits Otto Binder with the story and CC Beck and Pete Costanza as the artists.

Boy newscaster Billy Batson is doing his Christmas shopping at a department store when he notices large sparks being thrown from an electric toy train. He shrugs it off and keeps shopping for his alter-ego Captain Marvel, but moments later, a stray spark lands in the false beard of old Mike, the store’s Santa Claus. Panicking, Mike tosses the flaming beard away but the fire only spreads, prompting Billy to say the magic word “Shazam” and summon the World’s Mightiest Mortal (accompanied by the usual lightning bolt, which luckily fails to generate an even greater inferno).

Cap doesn’t do much more than use a fire extinguisher, but since he can fly, he’s able to do so from a more effective height, so I guess that’s heroic.

The store owner blames the fire on old Mike having snuck a puff on his pipe and caught his Santa beard ablaze. Mike denies the accusation but his boss turns a deaf ear, so Mike gets the sack. As this will leave the store without a Santa on the most important shopping day of the year, big-hearted Captain Marvel volunteers to play Kris Kringle himself, creating a dilemma for Billy, who’s promised to host a Christmas Eve party for his friends. And it would be a shame to cancel it, as Cap and Billy have bought gifts for each other. For Billy — who only ever wears a crew-neck pullover — Cap has bought a loud necktie, and for Cap — who only exists in times of crisis and has no down time for goofing off — Billy has purchased a Tiddlywinks set. It always puzzled me that Billy and Cap each seem genuinely surprised at the gifts they end up with, as if neither of them keeps track of what the other is doing.

Anyway the crisis is averted when Cap uses the wisdom of Solomon (compensating for a lousy short-term memory) to deduce that the cause of the fire was actually the sparks from that toy train.

The now-exonerated Mike gets his job back, so the store has a Santa again, Billy gets to host his party and he and Cap get those goofy gifts. It’s a happy holiday for everyone. Well, everyone except all those customers whose defective model trains went on to spark a wave of Christmas morning house fires throughout the city.

Next up is “The $500,000 Doll Caper,” starring Angel and the Ape. Though written and drawn years earlier, this tale was held aside and left unpublished until this collection, so it’s technically not a “reprint.” A detective/comedy feature, Angel and the Ape paired cute chick Angel O’Day with talking gorilla Sam Simeon for a seven-issue run in 1968 and 69, but I can’t have been the only youngster in 1974 who had no idea who they were. John Albano provides the serviceably entertaining plot for this tale, with art supplied by two masters of “good girl” art, Bob Oksner and Wally Wood. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them collaborate elsewhere, but they certainly make a for a good team here.

A crook has sewn a stolen gem into a doll in order to smuggle it into America, but through a series of mishaps, possession of the doll changes hands several times in the story, at one point ending up with Angel, who’s followed by the henchmen of the mastermind behind the gem theft. In a mid-story twist, Angel and Sam are brainwashed into becoming crooks themselves to help steal every doll in town, leading police officers to go undercover as a mother and infant to smoke out the perpetrators of this doll-based crime wave.

Sam is konked on the head during his arrest, undoing his brainwashing, so he clobbers Angel to free her mind as well. They escape police custody and head out to Santa’s workshop (Note: assuming Sam’s car doesn’t have enough gas to make it all the way to the North Pole, Santa seems to have temporarily relocated his operations to the edge of town). When the crooks show up, Santa and his elves teach them what it means to be on the Naughty list.

To be honest, I’m no longer sure what happens on the last page of the story because it was on the back side of the book’s centerfold, which I removed because it featured a superhero-themed calendar that I no doubt hung on my bedroom wall. Below is a copy I found online and lo and behold, the dates line up with 2025, so feel free to use it to get you through the coming year (something tells me we’ll need all the help we can get):

Next up we have a 1968 holiday adventure starring the groovy Teen Titans and entitled “A Swingin’ Christmas Carol” (from Teen Titans #13). Penned by Bob Haney with his typical unconcern for real-world logic and peppered with the kind of hip and happenin’ “teenage” dialog that only a middle-aged white guy could write, this one is chiefly remarkable for its stellar imagery by veteran artist Nick Cardy, who also provides the cover for this collection. According to “The Art of Nick Cardy” (2000), the story was drawn after the artist had finally asked for a raise from his bosses at DC Comics, only to have publisher Irwin Donenfeld declare he was planning to let a bunch of artists go (implying Cardy would be one of them for daring to request a raise). Cardy responded by pouring everything he had into this issue to let his bosses know what they’d be losing. The praise he received for this issue from fellow artists he respected, said Cardy, convinced him to stick things out a little while longer, but the experience also moved him to begin planning his transition out of the comics field (eventually leading him to equal success in advertising and movie poster design work).

One of eleventy-billion retellings of Charles Dickens’ classic tale, this spin on “A Christmas Carol” stars a money-grubbing curmudgeon with the barely disguised name of Ebeneezer Scrounge. He runs a salvage yard while dabbling in a shady side business in partnership with a local gang of crooks.

As I understand it, the “illegal” part of this scheme is that Scrounge buys junk from overseas, then restores it to pristine condition so he can resell it without having paid proper import duties. Now, I don’t work for US Customs and I’m not a tax lawyer, but I’m pretty sure there’s no crime here. Import duties are assessed based on the value of items at the time they enter the country, and at that point this stuff was junk. Yes, the ray later makes it better than junk, but that doesn’t change its value at the time of importation, which is all that matters. If someone were to restore these items the old-fashioned way, through manual labor, you wouldn’t charge them with a crime for doing so, so what difference does it make if a sci-fi “transformation ray” does the job instead? Of course what really makes no sense is that Scrounge is bothering to import foreign junk at all when there’s more than enough of it scattered around the good old US of A. Scrap metal is heavy and we can assume it costs good money to ship it internationally if only based on its weight. Why would a miser like Scrounge incur that expense if he didn’t have to?

Admittedly, there’s also the question of how an aging junkyard dealer managed to invent and build a miraculous restoration ray in the first place, but hey, this is after all a Bob Haney story. Anyway, Scrounge’s sole (legitimate) employee is an underpaid bookkeeper named Bob Ratchet who only wants to save up enough wages to buy his crippled son Tiny Tom a new wheelchair for Christmas, but things are looking hopeless on that front. The kid explains his dilemma in a letter to the Teen Titans, who decide to intervene by using their powers to impersonate the famous fictional Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future and hopefully melt the cold heart of mean old Scrounge. Alas it’s not as simple as all that as there’s also that gang of criminals to deal with, leading to a major scrap in the scrap yard. But ultimately the plan does work, as the old coot sees the error of his ways and rescues the Titans before using his miraculous device to upgrade Tiny Tom’s wheelchair to a spiffy new electric model.

I’m telling ya, Daddy-O, it’s groovy as all Dickens.

Finally we travel back again to 1948 for a visit by Superman to “Christmastown USA” (from Action Comics #117). The story finds Clark Kent and Lois Lane traveling to Christmastown for an annual “holiday fete” only to find the tiny burg in the path of a devastating flood. Meanwhile young Danny Osborne has gone missing on his way to the town, worrying his grandfather who’s counting on Danny to continue the family tradition of playing Santa Claus now that he’s reached the age of 21.

Superman chops down part of a forest (with his hands of course) and uses the lumber to build a huge ark with an enormous Christmas tree on the deck, the plan being to sail this Christmas ark through the flooded valley, delivering food and supplies to flood victims, along with toys and other gifts Superman will make by hand at super-speed in a workshop onboard. (Personally I feel like he might have been of greater use building sandbag levees with the local townsmen, but what do I know?) Grandpa Osborne is drafted to play Santa in the absence of his grandson, but his heart isn’t in it. Meanwhile Lois meets an amnesia victim who of course turns out to be the missing Danny. To further lift everyone’s spirits, Superman engineers a snowfall, which I guess is something you want when your town is already under three feet of water? Anyway Christmas is saved and Lois and Clark share the byline on a story called “A Merry Christmas for Santa Claus,” so all’s well that ends well.

Curiously, portions of the story have been very obviously redrawn. Some have speculated this is because the original artwork was lost or damaged, but it’s curious that background “extras,” vehicles and other objects look the same while most of the faces of the principal characters are reimagined. Here’s a panel from 1948 on the left and the redrawn version on the right, Superman having received a face lift and added muscle definition.

Even at age 9, I could tell something odd was going on with this curious blend of modern and retro styles, and then as now I believe the object was to somehow make the story seem more contemporary. This vibe is particularly strong in the new face Vinnie Colletta drew for young Danny.

Colletta is credited with all the retouching, but to me that Superman head up above looks like Nick Cardy’s work.

Rounding out the book are various puzzles and quizzes, a comic strip where you can write in your own dialog and these superhero Christmas cards which I thankfully did NOT cut out of the book.

On the inside back cover are some parting words from various super-villains, the favorite of which was this heartwarming poem from our old pal Bizarro.

And thus ends a fun collection from Christmas Past. As noted, I had a great time with this book then and I continue to enjoy it today. The cover especially stands out as one of my favorites of the era. Nick Cardy only stuck around at DC for another two months after this book came out, after which all those fun covers of his that so defined my personal Golden Age of Comics would abruptly end. I had the good fortune to meet Mr Cardy at a convention around 2000 or so and he had a copy of this book lying on his table. Earlier in the day a fan had given it to him in trade for a sketch. At the time, I thought the fan got the better end of the deal, but Mr Cardy was very pleased with the arrangement and obviously delighted to get a copy of the book after so many years. But maybe not as thrilled as I was to get it in 1974.

Happy holidays and best wishes in the coming year.