Comicon Advent Calendar 2024 Day 1: Celebrating Christmas With The Kids — Jim Medway’s ‘Crab Lane Crew’

Every year, Comicon like to spread the Christmas joy, comics-style, with the Comicon Advent Calendar, 24 days of festive fun and Christmassy comics goodness… time to begin for 2024…

This year though, it won’t be just me, Richard, sharing my favourite Christmas comics. No, this year, we have other Comicon writers wanting to share the seasonal sequential art with you. Are you ready for 24 days of something special, something seasonal, something packed with all the finest Christmas comics? Oh yes you are…

You can find all the previous years’ entries in the Comicon Advent Calendar right here. And keep up with all the 2024 Comicon Advent Calendar entries here.

So, I’m going to open with something very special, and something very few of you will have seen. It’s Jim Medway‘s Crab Lane Crew having a very special Christmas…

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Now, Jim Medway’s a Brit artist who’s not too well known, but for those of us who know his work, we LOVE his work. I first saw it when Crab Lane Crew ran in the short-lived precursor to the Phoenix Comic, the DFC. I didn’t get it straight away but my then 8-year-old daughter did. And once I saw it through her eyes, I was right there with her, revelling in how Medway perfectly tapped into showing us proper kids, with short tales that really got to the heart fo their friendships and joys and the little things that made them tick. The sort of things that seem simple to adults but are both incredibly complex and absolutely vital to kids. And Medway gets all that onto the page, all the nuances of all those simple little moments, the interactions, every little turn of phrase, every bit of body language. Perfect stuff.

After that, he went on to make the sadly out of print graphic novel, Playing Out, published by Blank Slate Books in 2013, doing the same perfect slice of life work but applying it to a group of teens instead.

I reviewed the collection of Crab Lane Crew back at the start of 2023 and had this to say of it in summary…

‘In Jim Medway’s Crab Lane Crew you’ll find a perfect glimpse into the world of young children, where friendships are everything and just the day-to-day little things are all that matters. Beautifully drawn, it captures every nuance of what it actually means to be a child – something that any child that reads the book (and those adults smart enough to realise it) will immediately recognise and adore.’

Yes, I still think that, and it’s a pleasure to be able to open up this years Advent Calendar with a typically delightful seasonal CLC episode.

Crab Lane Crew is collected and available from Gary Northfield‘s Bog Eyed Books. It would make a perfect Christmas present for the comics fan, young or old, in your life – buy it right here!

Now, ending the book, a delightful Christmas episode, where friends get together in such a perfect way, including the return of Scott to the strip to properly complete the Crew for an absolutely perfect Christmas…