Comicon Advent Calendar 2023 Day 1: The Christmas Spirit To Get Us In The Mood

Welcome, welcome one and all to the Comicon Advent Calendar, a festive treat of comics for you. All the countdown to the big day, just fewer calories.

Over the next 24 days, we’ll be giving you a daily dose of Christmas time comics delights. Some will be sweet and sentimental, some will be dark and nasty, some will be pure Christmas, others will be more about the turning of the season. But that’s the great thing about Christmas, it can be so many different things.

And to start, we’re going to a classic – Will Eisner’s The Spirit: A Trilogy. Originally published in 1941, it’s one of Eisner’s earliest Christmas Spirits, later collected in multiple formats, including The Spirit Magazine #12 (1975) and then in the Christmas Spirit collection.

These Christmas Spirit tales were a regular feature from 1940 through to 1951, a beautiful way to end a year of Spirit tales in the newspaper insert, each and every one of them showing us just what a master of the artform Eisner was.

A Trilogy is the tale of a King, King Hobo, made hard and not believing in the spirit of the season. Whereupon three wise men told their tales of Christmases past, all in order to get him to reform his ways. And all because The Spirit really doesn’t want to be out there on Christmas Day tracking criminals…