Comicon Advent Calendar Day 12: A Little Camp Fun For Your Christmas With Barbarella
by Richard Bruton
Here we go again, another comic-shaped window on the Comicon Advent Calendar opens – it’s 24 days of festive fun, comics style…
Time now for a little bit of silliness in a super camp Christmas adventure with the legendary space heroine Barbarella, as we dive into Murder on the Christmas Planet.
It seems Santa’s got himself a whole heap of trouble on Christmas planet, and it’s down to Barbarella to solve the murder in this silly and gloriously campy bit of sci-fi with a festive slant…
When it all starts, we get to meet Niklaus von Claus (Master Claus to the faithful Elfbot 348), dressed in all his red and white finery, who’s piloted his ship, the Tannenbaum, to an isolated planet, which appears to be just what he’s been looking for…
So, by the powers granted to him by the spirit of Christmas, he’s just taken over the planet, renaming it Christmas. The months are spent building a holiday village and Christmas resort, with his Santa tech spewing out promo ads across the Zone of Effective Tellurian Influence (ZETI).
But, whatever plans he had to welcome hordes of kids to the planet are shot down in flames on opening night. Instead, there’s this…
So, in the place of a perfect Christmas world, Santa Claus has created a village beyond ZETI law, a safe refuge for all sorts of ne’er-do-wells. And yes, it pays rather well for old Saint Nick, and he stops all violence thanks to his team of robo enforcers.
Well, all violence up to this point at least… and that’s where Barbarella comes in… to investigate the Murder on the Christmas Planet….
Oh, before I go any further – you all know Barbarella, don’t you? The ultra-camp, rather risqué comic series created by Jean-Claude Forest and first published in the French V Magazine in 1962. It’s full of camp sci-fi delights, rather a lot of nudity, and, at least for Forest, embodied the ideals of modern women in the sixties, all sexual liberation and feminism.
Of course, you may know the character better from the 1968 Roger Vadim directed and Jane Fonda starring movie, a camp classic, very much of its time of course, but a genuine charming thing, ridiculously silly fun. Also, it’s where Duran Duran got their name from, changing the name of the inventor Durand Durand.
But anyway, back to the comic. Forest’s comic series ran to the late Seventies, and that, it seemed, was that. Well, until 2017, when Dynamite published a second volume, overseen by Euro legend Jean-Marc Lofficier, from where this Holiday Special comes from. After that series ended, Dynamite went on to publish a third volume from 2024, with artist Anna Morozova doing rather good things that you should check out.
Okay, back to the Christmas Planet…
Barbarella’s not alone in this one though, as Santa calls in a marker and conjures forth ‘The Guardian of the Republic,’ a rather ridiculously costumed French hero, not coincidentally published by Hexagon Comics, for whom Lofficier is current Editor-in-Chief…
So, it’s off on the investigation, Barbarella and the Guardian doing the questioning of the suspects thing, while the body count adds up. Frankly, it’s just an excuse for Lofficier and Ruiz to parade a series of aliens in front of us, pushing a slight tale onwards to the conclusion.
And of course, this being a Barbarella comic, there’s even a little bit of time for a little bit of this…
Yes, it’s silly, yes, it’s camp, yes, it’s over the top ridiculousness – but hey, it’s Christmas, and if that’s not an excuse for a little bit of this sort of daftness, I don’t know what is. And at least it’s not the terrible, nasty sort of thing that I covered with that Punisher Xmas Special. At least this has got a little bit of a sense of festive fun about it.
So, this Barbarella Christmas Special might be pure fluff, but it’s fun pure fluff at least, with its heart in the right place.
BARBARELLA HOLIDAY SPECIAL: MURDER ON THE CHRISTMAS PLANET – BY JEAN-MARC LOFFICIER AND JOSE LUIS RUIZ PEREZ, COLOURS BY BRYAN WETSTEIN.
PUBLISHED BY DYNAMITE, 2018
Oh, and a bit of a bonus – do go watch Barbarella the movie, it’s a hell of a lot of fun…
