Today we’re looking at Marvel Two-in-One #8, published in 1974 by Marvel Comics. Cover price is 25 cents.
I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW this book is the only Christmas comic in my decimated collection that I paid a premium price for! I think I paid $7 for this book and one look at the cover will tell ya why.
Absolutely insane.
Something sad happened to me this year. As years go, 2019 had a lot of highs and lows and I like to think I took most of them in stride… but probably the lowest low was having our basement flood this March.
We lost stuff. Ellen and I were lucky that we had most of our photographs in plastic bins and electronics secured high enough not to get wet. Electronics were well about the line. The real gut-punch of the damage was to our books. Ellen collects a lot of cookbooks and I’m into all types of random garbage… you name it, I’ll buy it. Old issues of Creem Magazine. Movie novelizations. Lots and lots and lots of comic books.
The movie novelizations were fine. My Creem Magazines were set above the gushing water. My comics however… they got hit. They got hit bad. While I was able to move most of my collection, I lost about three and a half long boxes of comics.
IT COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE. I had just begun on a cataloging/organization of all my floppy copies and as such, had comic boxes stacked on top of comic boxes in a fort-like capacity, three or four tall. Had this flood happened a few weeks before my organization project, I would have lost almost ALL of them… but they were stacked, so many were untouched.
It was, however, those boxes on the lowest level of those stacks that took the brunt of the water. Sadly, two of those boxes were filled with unbagged comic books… ranging from the 1970’s to today. Most of the comics I lost weren’t worth anything. I’m a sucker for $1 dollar comics sales (or lower!) and I like to have a lot of books to look through. A lot of those comics will be easy to replace…
but the hardest thing that was hit was my half box worth of Christmas/holiday comics.
I don’t have many comics that have SENTIMENTAL value.
I will ditch a comic pretty quick if I’m looking to downsize. Stack ‘em all up and just get them gone. I’ll buy a trade paperback.
Those Christmas comics though?
They have a lot of sentimental value for sure.
Comics I bought when I was a kid.
Comics I read to tatters.
Also, writing these Christmas comics posts! “Blogging” as a fad has come and gone but I always enjoyed giving myself the assignments. Giving myself an excuse to sit down with these types of comics and see how creators took to the challenge has become part of my holiday tradition.
Anyway, here’s what I’m going to try to do. I still have the box of comics. They are in pretty rough shape but I have saved a few choice books. I haven’t decided if I’m going to rebuild this collection but let’s squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of this metaphorical tube over the next few weeks.
If you’ve never read the Christmas Comic Cavalcade before, I recommend checking out the Master list!
In the past two years, I’ve become a fan of Star Trek.
Previously, I never had much use for Star Trek. I was always more of a Star Wars kid growing up and, if I’m being honest, I found a lot of the Trek canon to be nothing but a slow, boring slog as a teenager. Star Trek was the first Geek Certified property I never quite got a handle on enjoying… and it perplexed me!
“By all rights,” I thought to myself back in 1992, “I should be incredibly interested in Star Trek! Look at all these other socially unacceptable pursuits I undertake that make me comically unappealing to the opposite sex! Comics! Toys! Video games! Science Fiction! Star Trek fits right in there!”
…and what was worse, I now realize it was never a better time to be a Star Trek fan than in the 1990’s. Ample opportunities to become a Trekkie existed in the during that decade, with a hefty amount of new spin-offs and movies being cranked out by Paramount. Still, nothing ever really appealed to me outside of kind of enjoying Star Trek: First Contact when I saw it in theaters.
Trek caught my attention in a big way in 2016 when I suddenly found myself very discouraged about the state of humanity in general. 2016 seemed to usher in a cruel, stupid new paradigm for my country and I didn’t like what I was seeing.
As with many before me, I found solace from the harsher realities of the world in some of the loftier ideals of Star Trek. The idea that some day… some day, humankind sheds the base, antagonistic bullshit we always seem to be caught up in and we get to explore the stars?
During much of the last two years, I’ve needed that kind of hopeful escape.
At any rate, I started getting into Star Trek: The Next Generation in a big, bad way.
Christmas doesn’t come up much in Star Trek. Besides a couple of throwaway lines and scenes over the last 50 years, no Star Trek series has ever directly tackled a holiday episode. That’s why I’m doubly excited today as both a fan of Star Trek and a fan of Christmas comics to look at Star Trek: The Next Generation #2, published in 1987 by DC Comics
…an honest-to-God Star Trek Christmas story. Look at Captain Picard defend that Christmas tree!
The comic was written by Mike Carlin with art duties from Pablo Marcos, Carlos Garzon, and Arne Starr.
Here’s holiday funny book I’ve been trying to track down for awhile… The Beetlejuice Horror-Day Special, published by Harvey Comics in 1991.
Before I get into the comic, let’s talk for a minute about how Beetlejuice the animated series was surprisingly good!
There have been many, many TMNT sleeping bags made over the years, but THIS ONE is the one I’m talking about.
My 2 year old daughter is convinced Santa lives in our chimney… so suck it everyone else, I guess. WE GOT SANTA IN OUR CHIMNEY AND HE’S BRINGING ME BEER.
By now you probably know the drill – every Christmas, I draw our family into a holiday themed picture which then gets used as the X-Mas card we send out to our friends and neighbors. Truth be told, I already had a go at The Grinch six years ago but I was never happy with how that one turned out (too much yellow!) and the previous grinchy doodle was done BEFORE we started sending these out as holiday greetings so… yeah, natural do-over.
Feel free to click here and peruse that last 7 years of holiday drawings.
Here’s a comic I did for Ohio Schools Magazine this month. It’s a slight reworking of a comic I did a few years ago.
Comics and Christmas have always gone together in my mind ever since I received The Essential Calvin & Hobbes as a gift many moons ago. I was so excited to be able to something in this vein.
Hello everyone. Sorry updates have been sporadic of late… but here’s a little comic about Christmas.
I will be finishing up the Minneapolis comics sometime next week, promise!
Teachable Moments 