Today, we look at an adorable Fantastic Four Christmas tale.

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 16 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

Today, we look at "Christmas Coda" from Marvel 1991 Holiday Special by Walter Simonson, Arthur Adams and Al Milgrom.

Good or bad, there a certain amount of artists who, in retrospect, are gamechangers for the comic book industry, the ones who end up influencing a whole generation of similar artists, whether they know it or not. One of those artists is Arthur Adams, who burst on to the scene in the mid-80s and his dynamic, incredibly detailed and extremely stylized artwork soon became the sort of rallying cry of a whole generation of artists, some of whom were actually OLDER than Addams, since he blew up at such a young age. While Adams was, in general, a whole other sort of new thing in American comic books (including his manga influences, which were relatively rare for the time), he noted that there were two other artists that were major influences upon his work - Michael Golden and Walter Simonson.

That is likely why Adams teamed up with Simonson for an iconic story arc in the pages of the Fantastic Four in 1990, where the two had the Fantastic Four be taken captive and seemingly killed, being then replaced by the "new" Fantastic Four (made up of Marvel's then four most popular heroes, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Ghost Rider) in a clever slight satire on the over-commercialization of comic books.

The two creators took that sort of clever commentary approach, as well, to this Christmas adventure that was released a couple of months after Simonson's run on the Fantastic Four came to an abrupt ending (I imagine when this story was written, Simonson didn't know he was leaving the book). The Christmas adventure opens up with Franklin and Sue Richards looking for a present for Reed Richards, but Franklin was distracted by a Christmas ornament that he wanted (and his mother bought him) that is, of course, a riff on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who were still in the midst of an unprecedented level of popularity...

A distracted Franklin then discovers a ghost who is all chained up and fading out of existence...

The instant implication, given the chains, is that this ghost is that of Jacob Marley, the old business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge who kicks off the events of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol by explaining that, unlike Scrooge, he was not able to repent his ways while he was still alive and is thus cursed to walk the world in chains, wanting to help people but unable to do so. The Marley that we see in this story is now, of course, over a century older and even more distraught at his inability to actually have an impact on the world around him and thus just slowly fading into irrelevance.

It is important to note that Sue noted to Franklin about the "Christmas spirits" in the air at the time, so Franklin was already predisposed to think about the supernatural elements at bay, but since he had grown up as part of a family of adventurers to which the supernatural is just another day at the office (Franklin's governess was literally the witch, Agatha Harkness), he takes all of this in stride.

So he heads off to the outdoor market to find a key that could free the ghost and he comes across a mysterious woman who has just the sort of thin that he is looking for, but it costs all that he can afford to give. He gives her his 50 cents, but that is not enough. He then realizes that "all he has to give" includes the ornament that his mother just bought him and ultimately, Franklin is a good enough kid (his parents ARE superheroes, after all) that he is willing to sacrifice the ornament to get the key...

He then freed Marley with the key....

In the original A Christmas Carol, Marley is described as, "Marley in his pig-tail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling like his pig-tail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind."

And therefore, he leaves behind one of those cash boxes and Franklin brings it home as his present for his father.

On Christmas, when the Fantastic Four were all opening presents, Reed is struck by his present, which certainly appears as though it was from the 19th century. Within the cash box is A. Franklin's ornament but also B. a coin minted in 1843. Johnny chimes in that that was when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol (it is kind of odd to have JOHNNY being the one who delivers that piece of information)...

And this ends up with just another unsolved Christmas mystery, but a happy one, at least. Simonson and Adams really work well together and Adams' art is as stunning as ever.