Christmas Spirit in Comic Strips
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Christmas with Will Eisner, C. E. Mondfort, Joe Kubert, Walt Kelly, Bill Watterson, and many more.
Newspaper cartoonists have been celebrating Christmas since The Nineteenth Century.
We, however, will remain a bit closer to our times.
In the comic book newspaper insert of the 1940s, commonly called The Spirit Section, Will Eisner regularly celebrated Christmas in his own inimitable way with late December stories titled “The Christmas Spirit.”
Kitchen Sink Press collected these and published them as a book in 1994. Through the kind graces of John Navroth we can read the collection. The first half of the book and the second part of the book.
One of those Christmas Spirit stories, “a trilogy,” reminds me of a classic where three ghosts also tell tales.
The Children’s Newspaper also ran strips, many of them little features on famous people and sports men and women. Many others adapted famous novels in newspaper strip format. The very first one, published in 1946, adapted Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol, drawn by C. E. Montford, and, as it’s Christmas, I thought I’d give the strip its first airing in over 60 years.
Continuing with Christmases past.
Paul Berge takes us back 100 years and more for some editorial cartoonists getting in The Christmas Spirit. Paul presents us with Christmas cartoons from 1902, 1917, 1920, 1921, and 1923.
Yes, kiddies, it’s that time of year again. The holiday season is upon us, and since I have yet to find any Festivus strip series, we’re going to run another closed-end Christmas strip from days gone by.
This year we’re featuring Gifts of the Magi, the 1983 Christmas strip from NEA.
Allan Holtz’s gift of Joe Kubert’s adaptation of another Christmas classic, this one by O. Henry, is already open. This link will take you to that NEA Christmas comic strip and many others as Allan has been at this for years.
How can we celebrate Christmas comics without Walt Kelly? We can’t.
Doug Gray presents the rare “Albert and Pogo’s Christmas” from Santa Claus Funnies (Four Color) #254 (1949). This story didn’t appear in the regular Animal Comics and Pogo Possum comic books that were Pogo’s homes at Dell so, as Doug says, “it’s possibly the one story missing from many people’s collections.”
Bonus: Thomas Haller Buchanan posts a collection of various Kelly Christmas comics at Whirled of Kelly.
Their mischievous ways may have secured them a permanent spot on the naughty list, but nothing brings us more cheer than Calvin and Hobbes’ Christmas shenanigans.
The GoComics blog gives us 25 Calvin and Hobbes Christmas comic strips by Bill Watterson.
Not enough? The GoComics search engine gives us 100 Calvin and Hobbes Christmas related strips here.
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