Comicon Advent Calendar 2023 Day 14: Samurai Santa And Jim Lee’s First Work
by Richard Bruton
Salutations and all the festive cheer and all that – time for another of our Comicon Advent Calendar entries for the year, our festive gift to you across the 24 days leading up to the big day…
Today’s little festive treat is, let’s be honest, a bloody terrible comic. But it’s here for just one reason… the day down in the art credits below…
Yes, that would be THE Jim Lee, here in the credits for this 1986 oddity, a full three years before he’d begin to get noticed at Marvel.
As for the actual story here… it’s all you could imagine. There’s a samurai called Sam. And he gets to play Santa in a department store.
On the walk home, wearing the suit because “when a warrior takes on a role, he must do so twenty-four hours a day” (Yep, that would be part of the ‘whatever you want it to be to suit the story samurai code.’), he manages to get in a bit of brave samurai action…
So, Samurai Santa is now famous, bringing more customers to the store and making his bosses very, very happy and they get to flog more crap to the kids.
Except, and who would have thought it, Samurai Santa’s having a bit of a wobble about the true meaning of Christmas…
Because everyone knows that the kids are all about wanting a book called The Religious Soul. Nope, they want the plastic tat and lots of it.
The whole thing rushes to an end with Samurai Santa facing off against the store manager in one of the most one-sided fights ever seen, before he gives an impassioned speech to the world about Christmas and walks out into the snow, never to be seen again. Which was pretty much the same as Samurai Santa the comic. Thankfully, Jim Lee went on to way better things than this rather terrible example of young talent.
