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

Today, we look at the 1977 Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip's celebration of Christmas.

One of the fascinating things to remember about most of the greatest comic book creators of the Golden Age of Comics is that, due to being the earliest comic book creators, they naturally did not, you know, read comic books. Because comic books did not yet exist. They grew up reading newspaper comic strips, which were (and still are, to a certain extent) tremendously popular. As a result, for most of the guys who started in comic books in the 1940s and the 1950s, doing a newspaper comic strip was seen by them as the pinnacle of their success. For instance, Bob Kane gave up drawing the Batman comic book after a few years, but he kept drawing the Batman newspaper comic strip until it stopped getting syndicated. Joe Shuster couldn't keep up with doing either the Superman comic book feature OR the Superman newspaper strip, but he lasted a lot longer on the strip than the comic book, because, again, it meant that much more to him. It was the same for everyone in comic books in those early days, including Stan Lee and John Romita (Romita was a bit younger than the other Golden Age creators, breaking in at the VERY tail end of the Golden Age), and so it must have been quite a delight for the two of them to get to finally launch an Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip in January 1977.

The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip rarely had much of a Christmas storyline. Very often, they would just interrupt whatever the then-current plotline was and say, "Merry Christmas!" Sometimes it was even really inappropriate (like Peter and Mary Jane were going through some hard times in their relationship, and her "Merry Christmas" to Peter was really kind of passive aggressive more than anything). However, in the first year of the strip, they went all out, with a Christmas storyline that lasted over a WEEK!

The story picked up from the earlier arc on the series, which involved J. Jonah Jameson hiring Kraven to capture Spider-Man and Robbie Robertson, Jameson's trusted second-in-command (and the Daily Bugle's City Editor), quitting in disgust with Jameson's anti-Spider-Man vendetta. Naturally, the whole Kraven situation ended poorly and Jameson sat in his trashed office bemoaning that he lost Robertson. Robertson was in the building cleaning out his desk and he overheard. He agreed to go back to work for Jameson. Robbie then called Peter Parker and let him know that they'd give him a small Christmas bonus. This was great for Peter, as now he could afford to buy the people in his life some actual presents. This kicks off an unusual Christmas story arc.

Peter heads to the department store, but it is so crowded that he decides to shop AS Spider-Man!

This Sunday strip is a delightful bit that plays on a standard trope in Stan Lee's writing, which was to make fun of the commercialization of the world. How many times in a Stan Lee-dialogued comic book has a pedestrian doubted a superhero battle, thinking that it was a PR stunt? ALL THE TIME, right? And here, we see the other side of that coin, as Spider-Man's appearance is literally turned INTO a PR stunt. Sharp stuff.

Then things take a bit of an odd turn, as the next few days are literally spent just watching Spider-Man going through the presents that he bought. And then a quick check-in on Mary Jane, who had just been offered a new job...

It's interesting, as I believe that Mary Jane had already been written out of the comic books as Peter's girlfriend by this point, but obviously she was still the girlfriend in the comic strips. Peter, being Peter, gets all pissed off at Mary Jane not answering her phone and storms out to go beat up some bad guys and also take some crime photos that he could sell to get enough money to buy HIMSELF a Christmas present of a new enlarger. He sees a crook who is recognized by a newsstand guy...

It's funny how generic some of the crooks were in the comic strip....

It is kind of weird to think that this guy was on the run and he decided to wear a mask in doing so? Anyhow, Spidey decides to give the newsstand guy the reward money, which is odd, as I doubt that Spider-Man was going to get the reward money ANYways, right? So it's not like it was much of a sacrifice, no? But anyhow, great panel to end the Sunday strip. Romita is so amazing (pun unintended).

WAS THIS A PARCTICULARLY GROOVY CHRISTMAS STORY?

Not really. Maaaaaaaybe the fashion? But otherwise, this could have easily been a 1960s comic or a 1980s comic.

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