Comicon Advent Calendar 2024 Day 8: ‘Leonide The Vampyr’ & “A Christmas For Crows”

Ready to open up the next comic window on this year’s Comicon Advent calendar? Of course you are… no plastic tat, no choccies, just pure festive comics greatness…

Today, we’re back to 2022 and Leonide the Vampyr, something dark and beautiful by Mike Mignola and Rachele Aragno, a Christmas one-off from Mignola & Aragno’s Leonide tales, and a continuation of the history of ghost stories for Christmas that Mignola’s just so damn great at.

The Christmas ghost story is something that’s just as much a part of the festive period as Santa and presents. And Mignola just gets that, gets the idea that Christmas has roots in ancient ideas of the end of the year, of mankind going fearful into the cold, barren months, darkness all around them until the light and the warmth came back.

And of course, with Hellboy, Mignola’s got a character that just perfectly fits into the telling of a good, scary Christmas ghost story. We’ve had classics such as A Christmas Underground and The Christmas Spirit (with Guy Davis), not to mention Hellboy: Krampusnacht (with Adam Hughes) being an Eisner winner.

Well, now we have a new Mignola creation to hopefully provide us with shivers of the season for some time to come – Leonide the Vampyr, co-created with Aragno.

Everything started with Leonide in 2022’s Miracle At The Crow’s Head, where the residents of a quiet little coastal village find a shipwreck, complete with a small coffin… complete with Leonide the Vampyr.

This time, there’s a carriage wreck that brings the small coffin and the small Leonide to some good and honest mountain folk…

.‘Oh,’ indeed.

Vittorio Sandroni is the dead priest connected to Leonide, her opposite in so many ways… as she is youthful and vibrant but bringing death and darkness, he is dead and decrepid yet the bringer of light and hope.

And so it is here, as Sandroni steps in to save the villagers, making good his promise to follow her, ‘even to the farthest corner of the Earth’…

.After that, the pair of them call on powerful forces above them, Leonide her father, Sandroni his God… resulting in them both being carried off by demonic wings to someplace strange, sparing the villagers in the process.

And then we have the brilliance of this one, changing things up, giving us something lovely and Christmas-worthy instead of the never-ending battle you may well have been expecting from this.

Instead, as they settle into their isolated imprisonment, we get something more far more than just the continued struggle of light and dark, life and death. We get compromise, a coming together, the supernatural equivalent of a Christmas truce perhaps.

.And so, as Christmas Eve night rolls on, Leonide and Sandroni experience things differently, first as Leonide is visited by those she’d cursed, those from whom she stole their souls, those she transformed into crows.

But instead of revenge, they offer her forgiveness…

.Once the crows have taken their leave, it’s not Sandroni’s turn to be surprised, as his unexpected Christmas gift to Leonide is met not by scorn or rejection but by reciprocation.

Both characters, taken out of their struggles, have moments here to pause and imagine different ways. And that reflection proves to be salvation for both of them.

It’s a perfect little story, managing to be, like its twin characters, an effortless mix of the light and dark. Mignola and Aragno telling a very traditional Christmas ghost tale, full of loss, sorrow, and, in the end, death. But then switching things around in such a way that the darkness of a very real end is tempered by that infectious spirit of the season. It’s a lovely, seemingly simple tale that stays with you for longer than it has any right to.

LEONIDE THE VAMPYR: A CHRISTMAS FOR CROWS – by Mike Mignola and Rachele Aragno, colors by Dave Stewart, letters by Clem Robins.
Published by Dark Horse Comics in 2022