It’s Christmas in Gotham City. As you can see from the covers below, it’s a time of violence!
Sure, putting a twisted spin on Christmas by playing its supposedly merry spirit against dark comedy isn’t exactly original… Pretty much every iconoclastic cartoon show has taken at least one hilarious jab at a Christmas episode (The P.J.’s, Futurama, South Park, BoJack Horseman) and, of course, British television has turned its Christmas specials into pitch-black masterpieces (Blackadder, The League of Gentlemen, The Office, Extras, Black Mirror).
The thing is that, for a lot of people, Christmas *is* a dark time of the year. Some people feel particularly lonely, or have to face their awful family, or put up with other peoples’ religious hegemony, or just deal with the fact that they can’t afford to succumb to the season’s consumerist bullying.
In such a bleak context, the Dark Knight can actually come across as the most cheerful one around:
Batman #33
My point is: the next time you see one of those grim Christmas stories in Batman comics, don’t assume they’re just making fun of the holiday’s benign connotation or using it for an easy contrast. In fact, some creators seem to recognize how emotionally damaging and terrifying Christmas can be, so they provide readers with yet another narrative about the Caped Crusader saving us from evil!
Ultimately, this is coherent with Batman comics’ takes on mental health and violent crime – these are real-world issues, it’s just that they’re blown up to the extreme in Gotham City, where nobody gets a break…
Batman #45
Christmas crime and mayhem are so common in Gotham that the comics don’t even necessarily focus on it anymore. Sometimes, it’s just there in the background during unrelated character development, like just another average backdrop to the main drama:
Batman and the Outsiders #19
Even the villains get into the spirit of things, their homicidal sprees taking advantage of the season…
Gotham Central #15
And the biggest villain of them all? Santa Claus, of course. After all, he does embody the damn season…
So Hitman #22 gave us a radioactive Santa. Batman #598 gave us a telepath who murders people with bad thoughts and is known as Santa Klaus because of his German accent. And The Brave of the Bold #184 gave us this asshole:
The Brave and the Bold #184
I feel better already.