The Last Christmas #1

’Twas the night before Christmas, and World War III broke out — or something like that. Most of humanity mutated because of the radiation, and those that didn’t became Marauders — like you do. But Santa, safe with his missus at the North Pole, tried to keep the spirit of Christmas alive. At least, until Marauders hit the Pole and killed the missus. Now Santa’s trying to kill himself, but for some reason he just can’t seem to die.

Sound a bit distasteful, does it? Well, this synopsis doesn’t quite do justice to the festively gory gross-out that is The Last Christmas — as if the cover, strewn with dead elves with candy canes and dolls’ legs sticking out of them wouldn’t have tipped you off. Some books make a success of spoofs such as this by either not crossing the line of good taste or crossing so far over it that the very over-the-top quality of the thing sells it. But this one never finds the balance — instead, it hops merrily back and forth across the line of good taste like a red-nosed reindeer in heat.

Because of this, Gerry Dugan and Brian Posehn’s script tends more towards stomach churners than belly laughs — which is a shame, as some of the jokes that make their way up through the radioactive, blood-soaked murk are actually very funny. To save Santa’s life after the Marauder attack, for instance, the elves try to push him inside the carcass of a dead reindeer — “We saw it in a movie once,” they explain when he wakes up. And, astonishingly enough, Santa’s suicide attempts are howlers. By the time he tries to immolate himself, the elves are so used to the attempts that they’re playing cards to pass the time waiting for the next one. Had the entire book tried for this sort of quirky, self-knowing humor, it just might have worked.

Instead, the book is carried on scenes such as Santa’s giving a baseball bat to a kid so he can fight off zombies, or an elf threatening to shove a candy cane up a Marauder’s… well, you get it. Oh, my aching sides! Speaking of zombies, they seem to be the main reason that penciler Rick Remender was chosen to do art for this kind of book, as he seems to do nothing for Image but books with some form of the undead in them. He and inker Hillary Barta go for a larger-than-life storybook kind of imagery, but it just doesn’t fit. Had this book been done, say, with a cleaner artistic style, something approximating the old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, or even if it had been done by cover artist Geof Darrow it would’ve made the horrific bits funny and the funny bits even more hilarious. But it’s not. And guess what, boys and girls? There’s four more issues to come of this stuff! Ho, ho, horrible. D