Comicon Advent Calendar 2024 Day 6: Fight For Your Right To Christmas!: The Stiflemix Diaries
by Richard Bruton
Time to open up another window in the Comicon Advent Calendar – it’s day 6 now and isn’t probably about time you were thinking of getting presents?
Do you hate the way Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier every year? The shops packed with glitter and tinsel in October? Christmas tunes on the radio just after Halloween? In that case, we have a comic that you’ll appreciate, as any mention of the C-word gets banned before December in The Stiflemax Diaries by Douglas Wheeler and the late, much-missed Tim Sale.
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The Stiflemax Diaries comes from December 1988 and the Comico Christmas Special, five stories of a festive bent all written by Douglas Wheeler.
It’s 2094 and there’s a clampdown on Christmas. It all happened when retailers started doing Christmas earlier and earlier and earlier, ending up with the Christmas shopping season starting just after Easter. Measures were taken – and you can’t help but sympathise if you get as sick of Christmas songs everywhere from early November.
But the measures? Well, they’re just a little bit too strict…
Yep, just a mention of Christmas and you’re in big trouble. But anywhere there are rules, there are rule breakers, which is where Stiflemix comes in, our narrator part of a resistance group, hanging out in June at their ‘Noel Liberation Brigade’ meetings, engaging in their normal subversive activities, ‘wearing mistletoe, roasting chestnuts, and listening to Bing Crosby music.’
So yes, Wheeler’s playing this for the laughs, and there’s loads to be had here, with daft idea after daft idea, the silliness coming thick and fast, whether it’s the ridiculousness of the group’s ideas…
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… or the addition of the priest – ‘why we ever allowed church people into our group’ I’ll never know… the way they act sometimes, you’d think that Christmas had been their idea’ – through to the grand idea of publicly decorating a tree, although that does involve getting into bed with the people who caused the problem in the first place…
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With the Merchant’s Association’s tainted money funding them, it’s off to do bad things. Well, dressing up in animal costumes thanks to Freddy’s Fake Furriery and planning their tree decorating stunt anyway.
Let’s just say it goes about as well as you’d expect…
So, is it the end? Will our narrator get caught? Maybe he’s looking for a Christmas in July miracle?
Well, what do you know, here comes that miracle, in the shape of an old guy dressed in red with plentiful beard. And one thing our narrator will always recognise is Santa Claus… ‘True, he was drunk, and he said his name was Willy Hockindonor. But that didn’t fool me! I recognise Santa Claus when I see him!’
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The fight continues, the Stiflemax diaries and the Noel Liberation Brigade will continue, with a new leader – as soon as he sobers up anyway.
The fight to give people the right to have Christmas all year round continues!
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It’s silly, it’s rather cleverly done, and it’s got a lot to say about society’s obsession with the session, not to mention the trouble caused by young men of a certain type who are all to eager to prove they’re right, plus all that great art from a young Tim Sale – all in all, it’s a great little Christmas thing.
The Stiflemax Diaries
By Doug Wheeler and Tim Sale, colours by Trishie Schutz, letters by L Lois Buhalis
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.
