It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is a Totally Tubular 80s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1980s, possibly ones that have a specific 1980s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).

The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Miami Vice Santa Claus giving out 80s presents, like a Rubik's Cube and a Sony Walkman, to four superheroes with the most-80s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.

Each day, a door on the calendar will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

Here's the story for Day 5, "Gifts" by Louise Simonson, Walter Simonson and Bob Wiacek from X-Factor #27.

This issue marked a very special time in the history of X-Factor. You see, when the book was originally launched, the idea was that the original X-Men would form a group called X-Factor that would hunt down mutants. The idea, though, is that while they would get paid for "capturing" the mutants they hunted, when they actually captured the mutants they would then be attacked by a rogue mutant group (name unknown) that would be, of course, them in their superhero costumes and they would rescue the mutants from themselves and bring them to a secret base where they would then train the young mutants. As you would expect, such an idea was incredibly messy and new writer, Louise Simonson, had the whole thing revealed as a secret plot by Warren Worthington's friend, Cameron Hodge, who was trying to make them look bad.

So they dropped the mutant-hunting thing, but now they were hated from all sides. From mutants for the whole "mutant hunting" deal and from humans for being, well, you know, mutants at a time when the public feared mutants a whole lot. Then came the Fall of the Mutants, where Apaocalypse attacked New York and introduced his newest horseman, Death, who was really Warren Worthington reborn with blue skin and metal wings (Warren lost his wings during an attack by the Marauders during "Mutant Massacre" and he was then kidnapped by Apocalypse and his death faked so that Hodge could try to seize control of Warren's riches).

X-Factor very publicly defeated Apocalypse and his giant Celestial-supplied ship in front of all of New York so now the mutant heroes were seen as, you know, HEROES for a change.

In the epilogue to "Fall of the Mutants," we see Iceman take advantage of their newfound popularity to spread some holiday cheer with an ice sculpture...

They took up temporary residence in Apocalypse's damaged ship, which seemed to be fixing itself as time went by. The city donated a Christmas tree and Christmas presents...

Jean Grey went to go see her parents and let them know that she was alive for the first time...

However, Leech (one of the young mutants in the care of X-Factor) felt that they should bring their donated toys to sick children in the hospital...

So the young mutants sneaked out of the ship and went on a mission of mercy. They went through a number of pratfalls before Marvel Girl, Iceman and Beast saved them, at which point they helped the kids deliver their presents...

But with the ship now totally fixed, we see that the ship itself was a "gift" from Apocalypse to them and he did not mean it in a nice way. I love that the issue ends with Apocalypse and his Horsemen (he added one of X-Factor's charges, Caliban, as his new Death to replace Archangel when Warren broke free of Apocalypse's control) toasting X-Factor like a jerk...

What are they drinking? Are they drinking champagne out of beakers or something? Weird.

DOES ANYTHING IN THIS COMIC SCREAM 'TOTALLY TUBULAR 80s'?

I think the "Fall of the Mutants" definitely screams 80s to me, but also come on, Boom-Boom is definitely a MAJOR "only in the 80s" creation.