Comicon Advent Calendar 2023 Day 22: Superheroing With Family This Christmas?

Welcome to Day 22 of the great Comicon Advent Calendar, our annual celebration of all things comics and Christmas. It’s very nearly, but not quite, Christmas…

Okay, one from a favourite here, something I saw a fair time back and have been keeping just for this Advent season — Dan Schkade‘s Yona meets John’s Brother. It’s a 16-part thing online at Twitter which you should all go amnd have a good read of.

Schkade, if you don’t know, has a long history of making these mini-comics online. Indeed, I’ve featured them several times now on the Webcomic Weekly feature here at Comicon. Schkade’s recently taken on the new Flash Gordon strip and is making it look just so great once more.

Anyway, this is Schkade’s tale of just what a superhero’s family relationships might look like, especially at Christmas and when meeting someone’s new girlfriend… it’s all rather wonderful.

The brother is John, the girlfriend is Yona, and she’s understandably a little nervous about meeting the family at Christmas for the first time.

John, he’s only really worried about his brother – ‘he’s pretty intense.’

Yep, essentially John’s brother is Batman… well, Neoman, but the idea’s the same. And it’s such a gloriously silly and yet gloriously well executed idea here.

Imagine the worst possible family dynamic for meeting your new boyfriend/girlfriend/partner. Imagine all the awkwardness and the problems, all the skirting around the fact that everyone round the table knows that you have a habit of picking the very worst partners and you’re only just getting over the last one too many years ago.

And now imagine that it’s not your slightly overprotective mom doing the awkward questioning, it’s actually Batman. Okay, Neoman. And that’s the absolute joy of this one.

Well, as you can imagine, despite mom and dad loving Yona, despite them realising that John has finally opened himself up again and this time it seems like it’s the right girl, Neoman just can’t stop himself from being the overprotective, paranoid, worst case scenario sort of guy.

All of which leads to a big blow-up, a smoke bomb set off in the house and Yona getting a little bit of time with Neoman…

It all ends as Neoman gets the call from the Commissioner. But not before a lovely little ending and proof that there’s hope for us all…