Marvel Holiday Special 2007

December 21, 2007

Marvel Holiday Special 2007 (Marvel Comics)
By Andrew Farago, Shaenon K. Garrity, Lou Kang, Fred Hembeck, C.b. Cebulski, Alina Urusov, Mike Carey, Nelson & Ron Lim

This year’s grab bag of Christmas tales from Marvel, with one exception, somewhat fals short. “Piece of Cake”, the lead story, basically deals with Spider-Man ditching the cake he bought for Aunt May’s Christmas party to help Wolverine fight a rogue Sentinel being piloted by a disgruntled Department Store Santa. Cute, but nothing special. Next up there’s an old Fred Hembeck strip reprinted from a 1984 issue of Marvel Age, and then the gem of the issue: “Secret Santa.” This is a Loners story, written by C.B. Cebulski, that basically shows the team trying to re-bond at Christmastime. Cebulski picks up neatly on some plot threads he left dangling in the Loners miniseries, and this story works both to give the characters a bit of closure and to establish them neatly for future use. Finally, there’s the train wreck “The Meaning of Christmas” — a Daily Bugle feature reporter goes on a tour of the universe to allegedly discover the meaning of Christmas, but… I gotta be honest here, I don’t know what he comes home with. It’s totally nonsensical. This book is worth reading for the Loners story and the Ron Lim cover, but other than that, it’s utterly forgettable.
Rating: 5/10

Marvel Holiday Special 2006

December 3, 2006

Quick Rating: Good
Title: A.I.M. Lang Syne and other stories
Rating: A

A look at Christmas in the Marvel Universe.

Writer: Andrew Farago, Shaenon K. Garrity, Scott Gray, Mike Carey, Jeff Christiansen
Art: Ron Lim, Roger Langridge, Mike Perkins
Colors: A. Street, J. Brown, A. Crossley
Letters: Dave Lanphear
Editor: John Barber
Cover Art: Frazer Irving
Publisher: Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics once again delves into its rich history and pulls out a handful of Holiday tales for 2006. While not quite as good as last year’s special, there are a few good stories here, and a special bonus treat – the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry for Santa Claus.

The book starts (and middles and ends) with “A.I.M. Lang Syne,” a perplexing story about an A.I.M. New Year’s Eve party gone wrong. This is really the only clunker in the book, which leaves you wondering why it’s even here. The story is presented in short segments, one or two pages at a time, scattered in-between the other features. And it doesn’t work. It isn’t a framing sequence for the other stories, it’s not a story that is strengthened by showing the other tales in the interim, it’s as if the editor simply decided to cut it up for no reason. And even that wouldn’t be so bad if it were a good story, but it’s pretty boring.

“How Fin Fang Foom Save Christmas” is far better. Picking up on the Fin Fang Four special from last year, Scott Gray and Roger Langridge show us a down-on-his-luck dragon wandering the streets of New York, only to stumble headlong into a new bizarre attack by the forces of Hydra. This is a funny story, well worth the read, that actually draws out some real sympathy for Fin Fang Foom, which is a sentence I never thought I would type.

“A is For Annihilus” is next. Home alone while the rest of the Fantastic Four is out Christmas shopping and making merry, Ben Grimm gets bored (which is a terminally bad thing at the Baxter Building” and winds up accidentally freeing Annihilus from the Negative Zone. The story is told in an alphabetical rhyme scheme by Mike Carey, which occasionally feels forced, but overall works for the purposes of the comic book. Mike Perkins’ artwork, with colors by A. Crossley, is quite good, and the story is given a sort of brownish wash that makes it feel like you’re reading out of an old book.

There are a few more features in the book, most notably the OHOTMU page for Santa Claus himself. Jeff Christiansen does an especially good job with this entry, blending in the historical life of St. Nicholas, myths of Father Christmas from around the world and Santa’s appearances in Marvel comics throughout the years (even appearances in the old parody comic, What The?!) to give us a nice, cohesive history for the character as he exists on Earth 616. We also get three “cut-out” ornaments celebrating Civil War, Planet Hulk and Spider-Man: Back in Black, which are nice enough except that no one would ever cut them out and, even if they did, the paper is too flimsy to really hang them from anything. The book concludes with a cover gallery of other Marvel Holiday Special editions over the years.

It’s a pretty good package, with only the A.I.M. story falling flat, and something that Marvel fans will enjoy for the holidays.

Rating: 7/10