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 Very Groovy 70s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1970s, possibly ones that have a specific 1970s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).

The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Disco Santa Claus giving out 70s present, like a Simon, while disco dancing with four superheroes with the most-70s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.

Here it is...

And now, Day 21 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

Today, we look at Christmas 1973's "Help Wanted" from Pep Comics #286 by Frank Doyle, Dan DeCarlo and Rudy Lapick.

Pep Comics is one of those rare comic book titles where, when it underwent a dramatic change in the function of the comic book itself, the title still kind of fit. Pep Comics, you see, was introduced by the comic book company, MLJ, which was named after the first names of the three guys who owned the company - Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John L. Goldwater. Like all of the other pulp fiction publishers who got into the comic book game, MLJ was all about superheroes and Pep Comics debuted the company's most famous superhero, The Shield, who was the first major American patriotic superhero. The series also introduced The Comet, who was a groundbreaking superhero in his own right (for a not so happy reason). However, a couple of years in, the series introduced a back-up feature about a teenager and his life. Archie Andrews soon grew so popular that he became the lead feature in Pep Comics (one of the most awesomely odd periods in the history of the company was when Archie and the Shield SHARED the cover of the comic. So you'd have them interacting in such bizarre ways). Eventually, Archie took over the magazine ENTIRELY and the company was re-named Archie Comics. However, unlike, say, Action Comics, Detective Comics, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Supense, Journey Into Mystery or Adventure Comics, the name of the series, Pep Comics, worked rather well for the new, humor comic-centric approach of Archie Comics. So it remained in use until it went under in 1987 (although Archie continued to use the name for some of their giant-sized comics throughout the early 1990s).

MLJ wasn't the only pulp fiction publisher that got into comic books. It appears that the only ones who DIDN'T get into comic books were the ones that had gone out of business before comic books blew up (I am sure that there are some exceptions, but very few. It was a natural progression for pulp publishers to also put out comic books). One of those companies was Fiction House. They had their own hit character, like Archie Andrews, only Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ran afoul of the introduction of the Comics Code, so the company went out of business around that time. Before they closed shop, they had a young artist working for them named Frank Doyle. When he was let go from the company, Doyle decided to transition into writing comic books instead of drawing them (like a lot of the great comic book writers of all-time, like Alan Moore). Doyle would actually storyboard his comic book scripts). He started working at Archie Comics in 1951 and continued there until he passed away in 1996. He easily wrote over 10,000 comic book stories for the company and was their de facto head writer.

Well, in the late 1950s/early 1960s, one of the top humor artists in the comic book industry, Dan DeCarlo, moved over to Archie Comics from Atlas Comics (now Marvel Comics) along with his longtime inker, Rudy Lapick (the two shared a studio together and it was actually Lapick who arranged the deal with the legendary Archie editor, Harry Shorten) and, just like how Doyle became the de facto head writer of the company, DeCarlo and Lapick became the de facto head artists of the company. DeCarlo drew thousands of pieces for Archie and, through the work of Lapick (who would ink the newer artists), the DeCarlo style of art soon became the almost "house style" for Archie Comics, as newer artists would draw in DeCarlo's style (as well as the great Stan Goldberg, who followed DeCarlo from Marvel Comics in the 1970s, and had been drawing in DeCarlo's style on the Marvel books that DeCarlo had been famous for, like Millie the Model). Guys like Harry Lucey and Samm Schwartz were allowed to continue in their own unique styles, of course, so it wasn't like some big draconian thing. It was just a general, "Hey, this guy is the tops, maybe people should draw like him."

Early in DeCarlo's time at Archie, he, Doyle and Lapick introduced Jingles, a brownie who worked for Santa Claus that only kids could see. He visited Archie and the gang every year (which, of course, doesn't really make sense since the gang never seems to age and yet Jingles would visit year after year).

This time, though, Jingles was sick of working for Santa Claus and wanted a new gig. Archie explained that only kids could hire him, since adults couldn't see Jingles. Archie then directed Jingles to the poor part of town, where the kids of the Riverdale slums (?) make Jingles feel depressed over how they don't get to experience Christmas...

When Jingles explains his dilemma to Archie and the gang, Archie has him talk through what he is feeling and we realize that Jingles never should have left Santa Claus!

He thanks them all and he heads off to go help Santa Claus again, and Archie notes that the poor kids will definitely have a good Christmas this year.

The story, though, really doesn't track, as essentially, Santa Claus was, what, ignoring these kids before? "Oh, we should also give toys to POOR kids? What a novel idea!" I love the work of Frank Doyle, but I don't think that this plot really panned out. But hey, when you write 10,000 comic book stories, some are bound to not work!

WAS THIS A PARCTICULARLY GROOVY CHRISTMAS STORY?

The fashion of the characters is very much the 1970s, so I guess I would say this would count.

As noted before, I do have 24 stories picked out, but I would be happy to hear from some of you for suggestions for Christmas comic book stories that you can think of that are distinctively 1970s (and, of course, FROM the 1970s). You can e-mail suggestions to me at brianc@cbr.com