Mario Muscar

 

A Child's Christmas in Niles

by Will Pfeifer

 

 

Christmas is a time for looking back, not forward – if not 2,000 or so years ago to something that may or may not have happened in Bethlehem, then back a century or so to the era of Charles Dickens. Or, if not that, at least to the 1940s, with George Bailey and Kris Kringle appearing in glorious black-and-white.

 

Or, failing that, if you’re a member of my misbegotten generation (hint – like the abbreviation for Christmas, you spell it with an “X”), you settle for reminiscing about Rudolph and Frosty and the Peanuts gang, all brought to life with wonderfully dated animation and frequently interrupted by ads for Dolly Madison.

 

But Christmas can be a very personal holiday, too, and all the TV specials and seasonal songs can’t take the place of the actual experiences we’ve had, whether with friends, with family or all by our lonesome. I’ve got a wife and daughter now, the latter of whom just discovered the truth about Santa(1), so while I’m looking forward to this year’s holiday (in case you’re out shopping, I want a book of cult movie posters, some dress shirts and new pair of slippers), I thought I’d look backwards to a Christmas – and a Christmas gift – that still means something to me (and, I’m guessing no one else), all these years later.

 

Nowadays, I’m strictly a comic book writer(2), but as a kid living in the Rust Belt town of Niles, Ohio, I wrote and drew them, cutting letter-sized paper into quarters, filling them with adventures of my all-purpose hero, Frog(3) and stapling them together for an audience of one (me) or maybe two (if mom had a few spare minutes). So imagine my excitement when, one Christmas morning, I discovered an entire ream of white typewriter paper under the tree. I’m not Tiny Tim, so it’s not like this was the only gift I received that year, but it’s the only one that I remember. Just holding that heavy stack of untouched paper, full of unmarked, untapped potential, I knew this was one of the all-time great presents from a mom and dad(4) who truly understood their oddball son.

 

(Digression: Want more proof they understood me? As a kid, I was obsessed with a book called “Great Comics” that collected substantial runs of dozens of classic comic strips, everything from The Gumps to Dick Tracy to Smitty to Smiling Jack. I borrowed it over and over from the local library, and desperately wanted a copy of my own. It was out of print, so my parents gave me a copy of “The Comics” instead. “The Comics” is an extensive (and extensively illustrated) history of comic strips written by Jerry Robinson(5) – and, in the end, a much better book that only served to fuel my then-still-growing comics. So, thanks again, mom and dad, for indulging a kid obsessed with 50-year-old pop culture.(6))

 

Back to the paper, which, when we last left it, was still unwrapped, untouched and sitting under the tree. So, what did I end up doing with it? I turned it into comic books, of course. My Frog series, believe it or not, ran for more than 60(7) issues from childhood to adolescence, and the majority of them were drawn on those 500 sheets. What’s more, at least two of those issues were Christmas-themed, paying unconscious tribute to the holiday that made them possible in the first place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, at the end of 2015, I still haven’t had a chance to write an actual, professional, in-canon super hero Christmas comic book, but I’d like to think I made up for that with those two issues of Frog. For those stories, I didn’t fall back on the usual comic book Christmas templates, like a reworking of “A Christmas Carol”(8) or our hero helping Santa save Christmas.(9) Instead, those issues of Frog  were a holiday-tinged mishmash of half-baked, nonsensical stories mixed with whatever pop culture debris was filling head at the time.(10) There were swipes from the then-current Flash Gordon comic strip, escaped arch enemies, last-minute rescues, sci-fi weaponry that was stolen from either Kirby or Steranko (or both), alien invaders dressed as Santa, snowstorms copied from an old Jim Aparo comic and, as the single nod to the reality of my youth, a very brief stop at a Christmas Eve church service.

 

I’m looking at those issues now, and though they barely work as comics, they work surprisingly well as time capsules. They’re chaotic, funny (when they’re trying to be serious), serious (when they’re trying to be funny), poorly drawn, poorly written and oddly charming. They’re also completely caught up in the breathless excitement of the holiday season like only the brain of a young Gen-Xer fired up on Christmas specials and Christmas cookies can be. There are family photos of those years, of course, my little brother and I tearing through our presents and posing anxiously in front of the tree, eager to play with the toys we just opened. But somehow, even photographic evidence can’t capture the mood – and the mania – of Christmas Past as well as those damned comic books.

 

And you know what? That paper still looks pretty good, all these years later.

 

 FOOTNOTES

1. Sorry, no spoilers here.

2. Teen Titans! Catwoman! Aquaman! Buy the trades for the special person on your list!

3. Don’t ask

4. AKA Santa – oops! Turns out I did spoil it!

5. Legendary cartoonist and creator of, among other things, The Joker.

6. Years later, I found of a copy of “Great Comics” in a Chicago bookstore and was so excited I almost stopped breathing. Nowadays, of course, I can find both books in seconds on Amazon.

7. Yes, six-oh. It remains my longest run on a series.

8. See every Christmas comic book ever made

9. See every other Christmas comic book ever made

10. A few years later, while in college, I wrote and drew a Christmas issue of my mini-comic, Violent Man, which packed in every bit of holiday pop culture I could think of by the mid 1980s. It’s not covered in this essay because, of course, it wasn’t drawn on that same ream of typing paper, but you can read it (and plenty of other mini-comics) in my self-published, trade-paperback collection, LATE NIGHTS AT KINKOS, available at lulu.com. I figured, this being a Christmas essay, I had to include at least one shameless, intrusive commercial. Oh, wait. This is the second one. Sorry about that.