I referred to the “battle around the world” sequence in Crisis On Infinite Earthslast week and then a couple of people who hadn’t read it emailed me and asked me why it was so brilliant. Consider this the Cliffs Notes introduction, then.
So, a bit of recap. Previously, the super-baddie Anti-Monitor tried to blow up all the various alternate universes in the DC Universe, and in fact managed to kill all of them except Earth-1 (the Justice League’s world), Earth-2 (the JSA’s world), Earth-4 (the world with the Charlton heroes like Blue Beetle, Question and Captain Atom), Earth-X (the world with the Quality heroes – Uncle Sam, the Ray, the Human Bomb, et cetera) and Earth-S (the Fawcett heroes like Captain Marvel and the rest of the Shazam! family). The heroes stopped him from doing this multiple times and then managed to fuse all of the Earths into one uniform Earth. The Anti-Monitor was not pleased and as a final gambit pulled the new Earth into his Anti-Matter Universe entirely, reasoning (correctly) that if he destroyed the Earth and its heroes, the rest of the matter universe would probably be much easier pickings. After a great “I am the villain and you are going to die” speech, the Anti-Monitor cloaks the entire planet in shadow.
(Anybody complaining about how the Earth would instantly freeze without the sun or how matter and anti-matter would make each other go foom instantly: comics. Shut up.)
This is the interesting thing about Sunburst: other than one appearance in a Global Guardians backup story in a Superboy comic, he was a total nonentity in the DCU Universe. I mean, total nonentity: he’d even been hypnotized – at his own request – to become unaware of his superpowers. Possibly this was because whoever was writing the story realized that Sunburst’s powers and gimmick were almost entirely a duplicate of the Global Guardian known as Rising Sun, who is pretty awesome in his own right.
But then, in Crisis On Infinite Earths #12, with literally no advance warning whatsoever, Marv Wolfman pulls Sunburst out of just about the deepest obscurity a comics character can go into, and not only gives George Perez the opportunity to draw Sunburst fighting the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons alongside Rising Sun as part of the superb “battle around the world” sequence (seriously, Crisis #12 is probably the most brilliantly crafted ending to an epic comics story ever and if anybody says different they are wrong and bad and also wrong), but he goes even further and he gives Sunburst a little story arc.
It’s Sunburst who convinces Dr. Light (the female Dr. Light, not Dr. McRapeyrape) that to serve as a superhero is the highest honor one can undertake. With no introduction beyond Sunburst explaining that they both had to learn this, Wolfman makes Sunburst a noble figure without giving him more time than the character deserves – Sunburst gets maybe five balloons’ worth of dialogue. And then after that he kills Sunburst off, offscreen to boot, because that’s Sunburst’s arc: he learns he has to be a hero, he nuts up and is heroic, and he dies nobly in battle against baddies. With five lines of dialogue and maybe six or seven panels over an entire double-sized comic book, which was not incidentally one of the most important books DC had ever published, the final issue of the absolutely enormous gamble that Crisis was.
Basically, Sunburst is the Biggs Darklighter of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s an object lesson on how obscure characters should get killed off: he gets a noble ending and his death isn’t fetishized for the sake of gore.
Count Vertigo is one of those villains who I think has never really gotten his proper due. He’s kind of stuck in between the second and third tier of DC supervillains and should be higher.
He started off with a decent powerset that’s pretty unique and a great costume (seriously, it’s exactly what a supervillain costume should be: the exact right balance point between ominous and colorful, without becoming garish or over-the-top). This was later extended to be given a really great character hook: the heir to the throne of a small European country. It gave him a sense of duty and a motivation often not present in supervillains.
Of course DC tried to piss this away by destroying Vlatava, his country, when the Spectre went nuts (which the Spectre seems to do every other year now). But that was easily ignored – expat Vlatavans meant that Vertigo now had a country to rebuild. And Vertigo will do whatever he thinks is necessary to do that, and he’s smart, which is why he’s one of the villains who jumps back and forth between working for himself and working for the feds and working for other villains.
And that’s the real reason Count Vertigo is a good character. Most villains are predictable, because most villains are ciphers who only exist to make trouble for heroes and barely have motivations in their own right beyond “want money” or “kill a guy.” (The Joker, who should be a force of pure chaos, is absolutely terrible in this respect.) But the truly great villains are the ones that are capable of surprising the reader.
Major Force, as I previously pointed out, sucks because when you see him in a comic, you know exactly what he’s going to do. When you see Count Vertigo in a comic, he’s one of the few DC villains whose actions are never guaranteed (Lex Luthor and Captain Cold are the other two big ones in this regard for DC); maybe he’s working for Amanda Waller on the side this time around and only pretending to be working for the Society, or maybe he’s taking a commission for the Society proper, or maybe this is all something to do with Checkmate. He never has a hate on for a superhero, because what’s the point of that? He’s a professional, and not just because being a professional is cool, but because it’s vital for his survival and his personal mission.
True independent agents in the DCU are rare, but he’s one of them. And that’s why he’s good.
When DC bought Charlton’s intellectual properties, they got some decent acquisitions on the cheap out of it: the Question is probably the most important, along with Blue Beetle (“the intellectual property so good, they shot him in the head”), and although everybody makes fun of Captain Atom the good Captain has his place as the DC Universe’s official dupe of shadowy powerful men. After a long stint of meaninglessness, Nightshade managed to get a little respect as a member of Shadowpact, and they’ve revived the long-dormant Judomaster tag by giving it to some new girl Judomaster in JSA: Fifth One On The Right Gets A Miniseries.
And then there’s Peacemaker. Peacemaker, living proof that no matter how hard you try, some concepts are just stupid. In the case of Peacemaker, the concept was “a man who loves peace so much, he’s willing to kill for it.” Seriously, that’s his tag line. You know how I know that’s his tag line? Because every writer who uses a Peacemaker – any Peacemaker – uses that tag line, because it sounds dramatic. However, it also doesn’t make any sense, because it’s stupid. It’s a very stupid way to describe someone who is essentially a cop in a costume – moreso than most for that matter. Like Peacemaker, it only sounds cool until you think about it for a couple of seconds.
(It also doesn’t help that he has a terrible costume. The Keith Giffen rendition above is probably the single best version of Peacemaker’s costume and it is still fucking ugly as sin – like a Cylon on ‘ludes or something.)
And he’s kind of a schmuck. The Christopher Smith Peacemaker is basically a crazy dude who listens to the voices in his head (which he started hearing after, guess what, he got hit in the head!) who tell him to kill baddies. This works really good up until the voices tell him to go kill Eclipso, at which point he dies because he’s just a guy with a couple of fancy guns and Eclipso is, well. Eclipso. Since then, there have been several other Peacemakers. They have all been either boring or stupid. Yes, including the new one in Blue Beetle.
It’s easy to explain why Peacemaker sucks. Peacemaker sucks because he’s just a guy with some guns and a little baggage. He doesn’t even have Punisher-level baggage to justify why he wears a helmet that looks like a tin-plated fan. He just kind of thinks it’s the right thing to do. He’s so boring that the best thing he can do is be bodycount fodder. He did that just fine. Let him stay friggin’ dead until the next time they feel the need to rejuvenate the trademark.
I don’t think any comic book of the ’70s had as much insane shit in it as Archie at Riverdale High. And that’s saying a lot, because we are talking about the ’70s here. But this title, launched in the early ’70s as a home for “serious” stories focusing on academic or athletic issues, packed an impressive number of WTF moments into its bi-monthly issues. You could pick up an issue at random and find: Archie beats up the members of a rival school when they “touch his body with a Central High towel”; a famous painter agrees to paint Mr. Weatherbee on condition that Archie will pose for him in the nude (which he does); Archie infiltrates another rival high school in drag; Archie uses special-effects technology to convince everyone that a kid is actually a superpowered alien named “Nazda.” Many of these stories were also full of floridly melodramatic captions, a possible throwback to Frank Doyle’s early days writing and drawing “Space Rangers” and “Wambi, the Jungle Boy”.
You can make an argument for the higher weirdness quotient of Life With Archie, where Archie spent the ’70s battling Satanic, child-murdering teddy bears, but that title always had fantasy/alternate-universe stuff. But what happens to a kid’s brain when he picks up a comic about high school adventures and is treated to a story like this one, where Betty loses her memory, wanders off and becomes a mud wrestler? And then the only way for Archie and Jughead to save her is for Jughead to disguise himself as a woman, and what is it with this title and men in drag, anyway?
I turned this into an embeddable YouTube video because it’s just easier to post that way. The Hector Berlioz music is just meant to speed the story along and the choice is not of any significance, though I take pride in the fact that the big cymbal crash coincides with the key moment in the whole story: Jughead’s realization that Archie wants him to make The Supreme Sacrifice. Which, as I mentioned, involves drag.
That story pretty much speaks for itself. I do want to point out one thing that has haunted me since young me encountered this in a digest. Understand, I don’t believe in nit-picking the plot holes in anything, let alone comic books. Pointing out every plot hole as if each one is some kind of crippling flaw is almost as bad as pointing out every continuity goof in a movie. All that said:
This previously-unknown kid who goes to the carnival — he has to be a new kid because they couldn’t let any of their regulars willingly go to such a “sleazy outfit” — sees a girl from his school who has been missing for days, maybe weeks. His first statement after recognizing her is “I’ve got to call Archie.” I’m just saying, if this guy thinks he should call Archie before notifying the police… or her parents… or even the principal… then he is so dumb that he probably walked into an open manhole as soon as this story was over. And that explains why we never saw him again.
The other important lesson from this comic is that you can learn a lot about characters from what they say when Jughead throws them Helluva Far™. Betty says “EEP!” like all good-hearted people. Stan Snavely exclaims “AIEEE!,” like some Jonny Quest villain. That’s how we know he’s evil.
For those interested, Yank and Doodle are the kid sidekicks of the Black Owl, a superhero who wears blue and red and therefore makes no sense. The Black Owl is a suburban family man and Yank and Doodle are his sons, but Yank and Doodle are not aware that the Black Owl is their father for some reason the Black Owl never adequately explains. This also makes no sense. In fact, the Black Owl is so concerned with keeping his identity a secret from his sons that he actually makes them meet him on the other side of town from their home in an abandoned lot. This continues to make no sense. Also, the Black Owl has a supercar that can transform into a plane, and is not somehow a millionaire of any type but instead basically Ward Cleaver in spandex, which makes the least sense of all.
Ah, Golden Age comics! Thank god Alex Ross was born so that you could be dug out of justifiable obscurity!
Retrospectives, whether of a year, decade or century, are really predictions: what willl still be appreciated in ten years or longer? What will history forget, and what will it view kindly? With that in mind, I’m going to nominate the past ten years as the decade non-fiction comics went mainstream.
So far as the last comics business is concerned, there’s little doubt that the major companies did basically nothing of significance other than continue their slide downhill. Almost every move they’ve made has been to try to consolidate and recapture their traditional audience, whether it’s been resurrecting Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, erasing Spider-Man’s marriage or recreating the multiverse. What few efforts they’ve made to expand their audience, such as DC’s Minx line, have received about as much support and commitment as a Fox sitcom. I’m not the first to point out the irony that this is happening at the same time as superheroes of various kinds have pretty well taken over the movie business; the problem for comics companies is that special-effects have advanced to the point where movies can do a better job than comics at delivering the kind of excitement superhero comics promise. Similarly, the rising quality of cheap overseas animation has made TV one more way of getting superhero thrills more easily and cheaply than comics. All that comics have left that no other medium can promise is the ability to deliver a continuing narrative (and shows such as “Justice League Unlimited” and “Spectacular Spider-Man” show that this advantage may not last much longer,) which is why DC and Marvel are now stuck on a treadmill of constant”events” and stories that never end.
From the perspective of the publishing business, the big comics story of the last decade has been the widespread adoption of manga by North American readers. There are a couple of reasons, though, why I don’t think that this qualifies. For one thing, it’s not really a comics story; the cultural movement has really been led primarily by anime, with manga tagging along behind. (It’s significant that the shop in my neighbourhood that specializes in such works is called the Anime Stop, even though the majority of its shelf space is given over to manga.) Moreover, while manga is now widely read on this side of the Pacific, it’s not read by comics readers. When people started putting together best-of-the-decade lists a few months ago, one thing that was consistently true was that all of them — whether assembled by a superhero loyalist, an indie reader or a catholic comic lover — failed to include a single manga title. Put simply, there is almost no overlap between traditional Noth American comics and manga in terms of readership, and what little overlap there is consists of American titles that ape manga in style and content. But the manga readership isn’t the mainstream, either: it’s another non-mainstream audience, parallel to but separate from the ones that read indie and superhero comics.
So much for what the decade wasn’t. Why was it the decade of non-fiction comics? One piece of evidence is just to look at the titles that made the New York Times best seller list, such as Persepolis, Fun Home and Stitches. You can look to the success of the movie version of American Splendor and the interest it aroused in the work of Harvey Pekar, a pioneer both in specifically autobiography and (along with his wife, Joyce Brabner) more broadly in non-fiction comics. But I think what distinguished the development of non-fiction comics in this decade was in part its broadening its focus to include more than memoirs. Look at the work of Larry Gonick, whose landmark series Cartoon History of the Universe began in the 1970s but was completed (three of the five volumes) in the last ten years.
Joe Sacco, whose work was nearly all published (in book from) in the last decade, is another good example, and it shows how well comics are suited for non-fiction topics. While he works hard to uncover the facts, he never presents himself as an impartial observer; neither does he try to remove himself from the story. When this is done in other media, such as film, there’s always a sense of being manipulated; in a Michael Moore movie, for instance, when you become aware of how selectively Moore is using his footage it can undercut the force of his argument. Sacco’s work, on the other hand, is transparently his own impressions and recollections.
One more reason it was the decade of non-fiction comics is that they have improved so much. Consider, for instance, the “For Beginners” series of books. The former books may occasionally have had some merit, but by and large they were hardly even comics — most often they were simply illustrated texts that made the old “Classics Illustrated” comics look like Watchmen when it came to comics storytelling. Compare these to a work such as Action Philosophers! which, while not without its flaws, is indisputably a comic in a way those books are not.
– DC putting the Milestone-verse into basic DC continuity not as an alternate universe but instead deciding to have Dakota be Yet Another Fictional City, like Metropolis and Gotham. This does not work. It doesn’t work on any conceivable level; Icon would not show up in the standard DC universe. The Blood Syndicate would be villains – the reason the Blood Syndicate worked as a team and a comic is that they were a loosely thought-out rebellion (by the characters, not the creators) against an uncaring or actively hostile status quo. That’s what made the book so damn good. But that doesn’t work in the DC Universe, where Superman is your friendly buddy and superheroes generally like people and with the exception of Hub City and sometimes Gotham, people are confident about their leaders and heroes and justified in feeling that way. (And yes, I know that they revealed that this was all because somebody did some magic and made this retroactively the case. This does not make it less retarded or cripple the Milestone characters any less.)
And the cruelest joke of all is that they made Dwayne McDuffie write the story where this happened. In those issues of Justice League, you can feel McDuffie saying, “oh, fuck it” on every single page – even moreso than for the other issues he had to write. “Hey, Dwayne – want to shit all over the ideas you put your blood, sweat and tears into? We’ll pay you standard freelancer rate.” Watching the JLA fight the Shadow Cabinet is like watching Hulk Hogan wrestle Fox Mulder – what is the fucking point of that story except to justify an insane editorial mandate?
(Don’t even get me started on propping up the decaying corpse that is the Teen Titans by having Static join. David Brothers over at 4th Letter has written about DC’s willingness to abuse and ignore the only new successful property they’ve gotten their hands on in decades before, so I won’t belabour the point.)
– Taking Superman out of the Superman books and replacing him with Mon-El and Nightwing and Flamebird is strangely reminiscent of what happened when Coke decided that people needed to drink New Coke instead of Coke. And I like Mon-El. But the interminable buildup to whatever the fuck is going to happen with New Krypton (and you just know it’s not going to be satisfying) and the endless Sam Lane conspiracy storyline aren’t the reason Superman books are dropping readers like flies. They’re dropping the book because Superman isn’t in the goddamn book.
– Speaking of Superman books, incidentally – man, has James Robinson eroded all the goodwill he had from Starman yet? Is there any goodwill left? Because right now when I see James Robinson’s name on a book, my instinct is to avoid it. That’s how bad his last year has been: the distinctive speech patterns that worked so well in Starman are completely out of place in everything he’s writing right now. I remember a few weeks ago there was this JSA special where he contributed a story, and Cyclone – a teenaged girl who is supposed to speak six billion words a minute – started expounding upon the nature of heroism in stentorian tones and I don’t remember anything more because then I had to start pounding my head on the wall until it stopped and I didn’t hear it in my head any more.
– Captain America: Reborn is a boring-ass event book. It’s a one-issue story – 64 pages, tops – stretched out to six interminable issues. It’s not a particularly great story. (Time bullets. Uh huh.) It’s also poorly timed: if Captain America comes back, I want to see him beat up Norman Osborn and return the Marvel Universe to vaguely normal, not sit around for months while the “Siege” storyline takes place and wonder if he should still be Captain America or if maybe Bucky should be Captain America. Incredibly unsatisfying on any number of levels.
– I would say something about Ultimatum, but apparently Marvel has decided that the best way to handle it is to more or less pretend that it never happened, and I am fine with that. There was never a limited series called “Ultimatum.” Isn’t life so much better now?
– And I loved ninety-nine percent of Asterios Polyp, but the ending drives me nuts. Don’t give me “oh but it was foreshadowed.” It’s a dumb capper to an otherwise brilliant work. TAKE THAT YOU INDIE COMIC YOU.
I once described myself as an “Artists and Models junkie,” which is not a description you hear very much outside France. We all can name movies that somehow manage to bring together a lot of the things we like, and this 1955 film by Frank Tashlin, which I watched again recently, has always been the movie that sums up a lot of things I like about the movies. And one of the things that perversely makes it more interesting to me is that it’s a confused movie: though it’s a satire of comic books and the influence of comic books on children, writer-director Tashlin doesn’t seem completely clear about what his attitude is to the things he’s satirizing. So it’s not only a funny movie, it’s like an exhibit for how a movie can get away from its creators and wind up saying things they didn’t quite intend. In this case, it’s a time capsule for confused, ambiguous attitudes toward comic books at the height of the ’50s anti-comics craze.
First, some background: Artists and Models was Tashlin’s first film with the superstar comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. (He made one more film with the team, Hollywood or Bust, and then made six more films with Lewis starring and producing.) Martin and Lewis play roommates, one a suave stud, the other a childlike idiot; I’ll let you guess who plays which character. Lewis is obsessed with violent comic books, particularly a book called “The Bat Lady,” which he reads to find out “if the Bat Lady’s gonna blow one of the Rat Man’s heads off.” Lewis also talks in his sleep about the adventures of an entirely original superhero, “Vincent the Vulture.”
Later in the film, Martin is invited to pitch ideas to gore-crazed comics publisher Eddie Mayehoff — whose comics empire is actually controlled by his ex-wife, and who falls out with the Bat Lady artist (Dorothy Malone) for submitting a comic with “no blood, not one itsy-bitsy nosebleed… no stranglings, no decapitations.” In desperation to come up with something suitably gory, he starts pitching the story Lewis told in his sleep, and it’s accepted. He can’t tell Lewis, though (how he manages to publish a comic under his own name without his roommate finding out is something the movie doesn’t care about, and neither should we), because Lewis has been turned against violent comics and is teaming up with Malone to create a more suitable kids’ entertainment, “The Adventures of Freddie Fieldmouse.” In a parody of the Senate hearings on comic books, Lewis goes on a panel show (hosted by a real TV host of the era, Art Baker), to explain that comics ruined his life by making him “a little retarded.”
Malone’s roommate is the young Shirley MacLaine, who also acts as Malone’s live-action reference for drawing the Bat Lady character. MacLaine is obsessed with horoscopes and numerology (I mean her character is, in this case), decides that she’s destined to love Lewis. So Shirley tries to get him to stop obsessing over comic-book women and get interested in dating an actual woman.
And as if all this wasn’t enough plot, Lewis’s dreams turn out to contain a formula similar to a secret U.S. rocket fuel formula, and when the comic book comes out, Russian spies — along with sexy Hungarian commie agent Eva Gabor — descend on Martin and Lewis to try and get access to his dreams. Some fans of the film thinks it goes off the rails once the spy plot is introduced; I think it works, because it marks the point where the movie literally becomes what it originally seemed to be satirizing: these people’s lives are indistinguishable from the insane comic books that corrupted Lewis’s mind. Also it’s inherently funny to see serious-looking U.S. authority figures reading “Vincent the Vulture.”
But if the movie seems to come down on the side of wild comic-book reality, that definitely wasn’t Tashlin’s intention going into the project. Tashlin had done newspaper comics, he’d directed Looney Tunes cartoons, and he had written some excellent children’s books. All of these professions were held in more esteem, at the time, than comic books, and Tashlin really did seem to see Artists and Models as his chance to slam the shoddy, cheap comics that had made a mockery of cartooning. He even said so while the movie was in production, telling a newspaper that the movie would express his feelings about comic books, that the only good comic books on the market were “the historical classics” (which at the time meant adaptation of classic books in comics form), and that he didn’t see why kids wanted to read comics when “Treasure Island is so much better.” He said that as a cartoonist he had done some hack work to make money, but that things had gotten worse in the comic book era.
That anti-comics attitude is all over the movie, of course, since the main comic book reader is Jerry Lewis. Any movie that implies that reading comics will turn you into Jerry Lewis is making a very strong case against reading such things. In case that wasn’t bad enough, the other comic book reader in the movie is Richard (George Winslow) a kid who has been turned into a homicidal maniac by reading comic books (and who also calls Shirley MacLaine “mop-head,” which is as accurate a description of her haircut as any).
But several things happened to make the movie’s attitude much more ambiguous than Tashlin’s own. First, a lot of the anti-comics plot points didn’t make it into the movie, and the ones that did were more anti-corporate than anti-comics. Martin was originally supposed to quit comics after he sees kids imitating the violent actions of his comic book superhero. But in the finished film, he quits after seeing the way his publisher is merchandising the character:
Like most good satirists, Tashlin couldn’t ignore the absurdity in any argument, even the arguments he supported. So the anti-comics crusaders, like Richard’s mother, are portrayed as prissy fools, and Malone, the comic book artist who doesn’t want to draw superhero comics any more, is portrayed as a humorless prig who needs to lighten up. (But, like all the women in the movie who aren’t Kathleen Freeman, absurdly hot nonetheless.)
And finally, as I said, the movie starts like a semi-normal light comedy and gets more and more wild and absurd until it becomes totally insane. This is partly because Tashlin never filmed some script pages that would have tied up the loose ends of the plot. But it’s also because when you watch the movie from beginning to end, it’s like the whole story is taking Lewis’s side, turning the world into a riot of action, splashy color, sexy spies and world-domination plots, just like a comic book. Intentionally or not, final effect is to make us feel like comics, the shame of the ’50s, aren’t really so different from movies, the ultimate middlebrow family entertainment. The ’60s and ’70s directors who loved this movie (like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, whose movie Celine and Julie Go Boating was sort of an homage to Artists and Models) certainly thought so.
So it’s a movie that has a lot to say about why there was so much worry and panic about comic books in 1955; it’s also a movie that, almost unwittingly, tells us why movies and comic books have now became interchangeable.
Also, it’s got a scene where a chiropractor and/or massage therapist twists Jerry Lewis’s body into a human pretzel. Which satisfies both our need for cartoon slapstick and our need to see Jerry Lewis suffer great pain.
I was gonna do this week’s entry starting out by making fun of Strong Bow’s listed abilities, which include the fact that he has very strong legs since he walks a lot. But then I looked at him and I changed my mind.
I changed my mind because fucking look at him. This is not some happy nature warrior. Look at the face. This guy is a stone-cold killer. He’s not a psychopath or a kill-crazy fun-seeker or a berserker ninja samurai Canadian possibly descended from a race of werewolves or something. He’s not somebody who kills people for fun; there’s no pleasure in it for him. It’s just what he often ends up having to do, and he’s just really, really good at killing people. You can tell just by looking at him, and by the way he holds that giant fucking knife.
This, my friends, is a total one hundred percent badass. Look at the background art, where he is stabbing a dinosaur to death. Maybe he needs meat for a long journey. Maybe the dinosaur decided to try and kill him, and found out the error of its ways. It doesn’t really matter. Strong Bow doesn’t care either way. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that the dinosaur has to die. Somewhere in the universe’s cosmic planner, somebody wrote “today, Strong Bow kills dinosaur,” and the reasons are really besides the point; there’s need for him to kill a dinosaur, so he kills the dinosaur.
Maybe I’m basing all of this on one bit of art, but so what? Look at it.
It begins when a man in a Santa outfit is found dead in a New York alleyway, his face ripped apart beyond recognition and every drop of blood in his body exsanguinated. But it doesn’t end there. The very next day, a second Santa is found hanging from the London Bridge, his eyes gouged out – later during the autopsy, it is revealed that several of his organs have gone missing, even though there is no scar indicating a place where they might have been removed. A third Santa shows up in the middle of a Vancouver plaza on day three, with skin the consistency of melted wax; on day four, a headless, limbless torso in a Santa coat shows up outside the Sydney Opera House.
But these are not just any Santas. These, every one, are members of the Santae.
The Santae are a very, very old brotherhood, not just of humans but indeed a plethora of supernatural creatures as well. Wizards, sorcerers, spirits, ghosts, monsters, angels, demons, lawyers, you name it – the Santae don’t care what you are so long as you’re willing to contribute to their crusade. Which, in a word, is Christmas.
You see, a long time ago, a number of magicians and influential citizens of ancient Rome came together to discuss a growing threat – an enemy from elsewhere, which fed on human fear, sorrow and misery. This emotional vampirism empowered these entities ever more greatly, but the Romans understood that you couldn’t simply stop people from being afraid or sad; it didn’t work. Human nature is a bit too pessimistic to allow it on a mass scale. The entities were growing ever more powerful and standard magic grew less and less effective; their tendrils reached into this world to create moments of fear and pain that were occultly significant and gave them ever more power. They wanted to come here and turn this world into a new hell of their own design.
Then one of the group that would become the Santae, a penitent demon by the name of Krngl, had an idea. What if people could be convinced to spread joy, cheer and love? Not all the time – just enough that the Santae could use these outpourings of positive emotion as the equivalent of spiritual and cosmological booster shots for the entire planet, working behind the scenes to create the circumstances where occultly significant shows of hope and love and other fine emotions could be tuned to attack the entities. The group didn’t have any better ideas (they were frankly pretty desperate by this point) and were cheerfully surprised when it turned out that this plan actually worked at that year’s Saturnalia.
From that moment the Santae worked tirelessly to serve their planet, using winter festivals and holidays as their cover. The Santae used whatever was convenient: the Festival of Sol Invictus, Diwali, the Chinese New Year (which they made sure spread to most of the eastern half of Asia), Yule, Eid, Chanukah (recently, Jewish members of the Santae have taken to calling themselves “Chanukah Harries,” mostly because they like a good joke as much as anybody else), and of course Christmas. It was the Santae who made sure that Oliver Cromwell died of “malaria,” ending his Puritan Parliament, and it was a member of the Santae working in the Coca-Cola corporation who suggested a new Christmastime marketing campaign using Santa Claus, popularizing his image throughout the world. Every year, they turn hundreds of shows of virtue into magical weapons in the Earth’s defense; every year, they protect the planet anew.
And now, somebody is killing them off. That’s when the Santae go to the one man they know can help them: the Sorcerer Supreme.
