Mainlining Christmas

2011 Bonus! The BEST holiday comic experience this year is the delightful one-page piece over at Mike Maihack's blog. Click HERE! In my quest to experience as much Christmas as possible, I picked up a couple of holiday-looking issues during a sale at my local comic shop. The Larfleeze Special I got when it came out last year. These are all really fun issues. Happy Holidays and Merry Reading! JLA #60 (Released 2001) Writer: Mark Waid, Pencils: Cliff Rathburn, Inks: Paul Neary, Colors: David Baron “Twas the Fight Before Christmas!” This is an incredibly silly little one-shot story, in which Plastic Man tries to convince a kid that Santa is on the Justice League. His explanation of how this came to be involves Neron, demon elves, evil gingerbread men, and Santa's surprise super-powers. The kid often knows more about the League than Plastic Man, and corrects the hero, like any good comic nerd. It's extremely zany, and I definitely enjoyed it. DCU Infinite Holida

The best part of checking out window displays in New York is usually the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. This year I took a few more pictures, but I still didn't get everything. On one side of the building, everything was horses. Then you round the corner, and there are a few long skinny windows: The main windows, this year, are titled "Carnival of the Animals". Each window has a different color theme, and a different material. The first window was all brass metals: The second window, white, done up in fur and crystal: There was a tiny window near the door that held, well, this: The third big window was blue, and all done with mosaic tile: The fourth window was black and white, and all the animals there were made of paper! The fifth was brown, and all of wood.  From across the street you can see the effect of the colors: If you keep going around the third side

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to coherently describe what happened in the special, but I know I can explain how it came to be. There was a meeting, quite possibly in a studio boardroom, where someone said, "Hey. You know what we need? Another Rudolph." To which someone else added, "And we need something that's religious, really puts the Christ in Christmas." And fifteen minutes later the storyboard for Nestor: the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey was born. I don't think I've ever seen this before, probably because it doesn't have the same exposure most of the other specials have. This is kind of a shame, because it's just about the most screwed-up thing I've ever seen, and I feel like more people should be familiar with it. This is narrated by Nestor's descendant, whose name escapes me and I don't care enough to look up. I should probably add that Nestor's descendant works for Santa Claus at the North Pole. This i

This years' Window Displays start with the creepy mannequins of Saks Fifth Avenue. There's some ridiculous almost-a-story being told in rhymed couplets on the surface of the windows. Something about the magic bubble factory under Saks, where bored ladies in expensive dresses run Dr. Seuss-style machines. The machines are actually quite interesting looking, and they move, and the dresses are pretty. The juxtaposition, though, is just weird. Also the creepy little girl mannequin in the Santa hat is constantly skulking in the background: The displays are also sprinkled with little fake animals in the corners, with no explanation. Inside Saks they've decorated the ceiling, mostly. The next interesting store I spotted I guess is called H. Stern? It looks like a jewelry place. They had a live jazz band on a Thursday afternoon. I didn't even think about going in. Their windows were interesti