Number 426


Santa Claus in trouble!


Ever have one of those nightmares? You're trying to go to work but you can't find your car, and while you're looking you're getting later and later, and things get more and more hopeless...I've had a few of those dreams. Santa Claus, at least in this story from Santa Claus Funnies #1, 1942, isn't having a nightmare; he can't find his sled and reindeer for real! On Christmas Eve, yet. Tsk. I guess he needs to get a better sled alarm system or something.


This is the first of four consecutive Thursdays featuring Christmas stories, finishing up on Thursday, December 25.

**********

Check out the classic "Santa in Wonderland" story featured in Pappy's #231 from 2007. It's a great story that got a lot of play around the Internet.

Number 238


How Santa Got His Red Suit



It's Christmas Eve! Hope you boys and girls have been good this year, so Santa will give you what you want.

What Pappy wants is to give you are some good comics for Christmas, and here's a Walt Kelly strip from Santa Claus Funnies, Dell Comics Four-Color #61, December 1944.



Santa, who doesn't wear his familiar red suit at the time, but dresses in his "gay costumes," goes on his yearly run, only to get sleighjacked by Jack Frost. Santa ends up with a bunch of naked little guys, who eventually get some clothes made from Santa's suit, and then make Santa the red suit we all know.

"How Santa Got His Red Suit" was reprinted two years later as the second of the March Of Comics giveaway series. The first three March Of Comics were by Kelly, which showed his popularity, even before his fame exploded into the mainstream with the Pogo comic strip five years later.

*******

Ho-ho-ho! As a bonus, here are a couple of Santa Claus covers from vintage issues of Galaxy Science Fiction I picked up a couple of years ago. Santa has an extra set of appendages in these gorgeous Ed Emshwiller illustrations. This unearthly Santa embodies the old saying, "Forewarned is four-armed."


Merry Christmas, everybody!

Number 231



Santa 'shrooms



Santa meets Alice and goes down the rabbit hole in this story from Dell's Santa Claus Funnies #2, 1943. It's a clever reworking of the familiar Lewis Carroll story.The unknown artist also used Sir John Tenniel's classic illustrations as the basis for the Wonderland characters.

It's tempting to throw in a reference to Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit," magic mushrooms, Summer of Love, dancing naked in the park, psychedelics, hallucinogens…but that would be cheap and of course at Pappy's we don't go for the cheap, do we? No, we don't. Just because this story got me to pull out my old vinyl copy of Surrealistic Pillow doesn't mean anything, and don't infer anything from it.