Today, we discover what happens when Santa Claus is put out of commission by Latveria's defenses and he must entrust his duties to...Doctor Doom!?
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 Dope 90s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1990s, possibly ones that have a specific 1990s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).
This year's Advent Calendar, of Grunge Santa Claus giving out 90s present, like a Tamagotchi, while posing with four superheroes with the most-90s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.
And now, Day 20 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...
Today we look at 1990's "I'll Be Doom For Christmas" by Scott Lobdell and John Byrne from What The-?! #10.
WHAT WAS WHAT THE-?!
In 1989, Marvel revived its old series that took looks at how famous stories could have gone a whole other direction, What If...?, with a one-shot drawn by Steve Ditko that had sat on a shelf for a few years. It was a big enough of a success to warrant a brand-new series in the next year. Around the same time, as part of Marvel expanding their comic book line period with the booming sales successes of the late 1980s/early 1990s (full into the swing of the speculator sales boom), Marvel also decided to test the waters with a revival of another one of its older series. This time, it was the comedy series, Not Brand Echh, where Marvel's top creators would mock...Marvel.
Not Brand Echh was Marvel's answer to Mad Magazine and it was a beloved series by those that read it, it just was not the most popular of series (comedy from Marvel has always been a bit of a hard sell, for whatever reason), so it lasted just 13 issues in the late 1960s. In 1988, Marvel tried the concept again, this time trying to tie the name in with the similar-sounding What If...? by calling the new series, What The-?!, and giving it a four-issue miniseries (the term "Not Brand Echh" was play on both the then-famous commercial approach to compare a product to "Brand X" and show how superior it was to "Brand X" as well as Stan Lee' penchant to refer to comic book competitors of Marvel during the 1960s as "Brand Echh"). The miniseries famously featured a few stories by John Byrne, including an extensive parody of his own work by John Byrne in the second issue that also served as an homage to one of the most famous Mad comic book parodies (Harvey Kurtzman and Wallace Wood's Superduperman from Mad #4).
The miniseries sold well enough that it was made into an ongoing series, with #5 debuting nine months after #4 and then proceeding as a mostly bi-monthly series until it ended in 1993 (by which point it had become a quarterly release). The tenth issue, released in November of 1990, was the title's Christmas issue.
DOOM AS A NOBLE FIGURE
Before going into the story from What The-?! #10 that we're here to discuss, I wanted to quickly say a quick word about Doctor Doom's status as a noble figure. One of the most controversial debates about Doctor Doom in comic book fandom is just HOW noble Doctor Doom really is. Writers have gone back and forth on this topic for many years. It appears fair to say that thee is a very large segment of comic book fandom that find Doom appealing BECAUSE he as a certain air of nobility to him. For instance, during John Byrne's run on Fantastic Four, he explained that Latveria was in much better shape when Doom was running it than other people (with the Fantastic Four even agreeing to help Doom take the country back...well, more to help him free the country from the tyrant that had replaced him, but they had to know that there was a good chance that that meant that Doom would be taking over himself).
However, Doom has done plenty of awful things over the years that no one with true nobility would ever do. It's hard to categorize Doom one way or the other and I assume that that is the charm of the character to most people (of course, there is also a small group of people who try to insist that Doom isn't even really a villain, and, well, to them, I have a recurring saying - don't take contrarian positions too seriously.
THE STORY OF SANTA-DOOM
The nobility of Doom being at odds with the villainy of Doom is at the heart of "I'll Be Doom For Christmas," by Scott Lobdell (Lobdell was a standup comedian before he wrote for Marvel, so he was a regular in the early days of What The-?! before he became a star writer on the X-Men titles) and John Byrne, where Santa Claus is injured by Latveria's defenses (the story is reminiscent of the Darkseid/Santa Claus story that we featured yesterday) and Santa entrusts Doom to continue his Christmas deliveries for him...
Leaning into that noble "my word is my bond" angle, Doom agrees to take over, with an over-dramatic flair of announcing himself as Santa-Doom!
He begins traveling the world, delivering presents, but the superheroes of Earth are all very suspicious and they all sneak up on him to confront him...
It does not go well (by the way, do note the clever rhymes by Lobdell, who kept the whole thing as a "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" parody, as well as a How the Grinch Stole Christmas parody) and soon, Santa-Doom is having a full-out fight with Marvel's superheroes...
An innocent little girl is confused at the scene and a chagrined Doom convinces her that the heroes are just Santa's helpers...
Santa-Doom finishes things out for Santa and ol' Saint Nick gives him the reward that he promised him, which apparently was a teddy bear that Doom had likely wanted since he was a little boy...
This was a cute, well-told story with excellent artwork.