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

Today, we look at Christmas 1978's "Sword and the She-Devil" from Marvel Team-Up #79 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin (those three worked on some other comic books, as well, but they were not particularly well-known)...

There are a lot of team-up stories in the Advent Calendar this year, so I feel like I am repeating the same basic introduction each time because, well, for the most part, I am. However, in this instance, this specific comic book is an ESPECIALLY good example of the point I have been making about team-up comic books.

As noted, the old newsstand format lent itself to the popularization of team-up comic books, as most (not all, of course, but most) comic book purchases back in the day were impulse purchases. In other words, you grabbed a comic book when you were at the newsstand or the drugstore and you grabbed whatever comic book looked the coolest to you. And if you liked Spider-Man and, say, Thor, if you saw a comic book starring Spider-Man AND Thor, then you just got two heroes for the price of one. As we got to the direct market model, comic book customers were coming to the comic book store mostly for comic books that they wanted before they got there. And then, comic book readers wanted comic books that "mattered." One-off stories between Spider-Man and another superhero weren't really going to affect the continuity of either character, so team-up books were slowly phased out.

This issue has a perfect example of what I am talking about vis a vis continuity. You see, during his acclaimed run following Stan Lee on Amazing Spider-Man, Gerry Conway slowly supplanted Gwen Stacy as Spider-Man's main love interest with Mary Jane Watson. Gwen died during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin and Mary Jane got her flighty act together and became Peter's rock during his grief over Gwen. What initially began as simply one friend helping another friend through a difficult period soon became a lot more and Peter and Mary Jane started dating. Then Len Wein took over the series from Conway and Wein, while giving Mary Jane a lot of screentime, clearly was less dedicated to the relationship as Conway. So Peter and Mary Jane were back to being sort of friends/sort of dating (it was really pretty weird). Then Marv Wolfman took the series over and Wolfman REALLY didn't want Peter and Mary Jane together. So he had Peter propose to Mary Jane and have Mary Jane basically laugh in his face. Bill Mantlo tried to explain her reaction more in the pages of Spectacular Spider-Man and then Wolfman brought her back to give her a more ceremonious departure. So Mary Jane was definitely GONE from the comics.

Until she shows up in Marvel Team-Up #79 as if nothing has changed between her and Peter, of course.

The comic opens with the Daily Bugle Christmas party, where Clark Kent is visiting from DC Comics (as I noted earlier in the calendar, somehow this is the second time Clark has shown up in a Marvel Christmas comic book. What's up with that?) and Mary Jane shows up, as well.

Claremont, Byrne and Austin do a GREAT job with Mary Jane. I especially loved how she snuck a ride to the museum with Peter. This is the Mary Jane we saw debut in Amazing Spider-Man #42, the vivacious, "Run into danger at the drop of a hat" Mary Jane.

Anyhow, the museum is being besieged by the villainous sorcerer, Kulan Gath, and when Mary Jane comes across a sword, she is drawn to it and finds herself possessed by the spirit of Red Sonja!

Red Sonja had debuted early in the 1970s in the pages of Conan the Barbarian and soon became a popular character. However, years later, the owners of the rights to Conan split Red Sonja into her own subsidiary company and then later, both companies were sold to different people. Marvel once had the license to print Conan comic books and recently recovered that license, but the Red Sonja license is elsewhere (Dynamite currently makes Red Sonja comics) and so Marvel can only reprint this comic book in conjunction with Dynamite. It's a real shame for comic book fans, but reasonable enough. Marvel DID reprint it a couple of times before they lost the license, including in an issue of Marvel Tales.

Anyhow, Red Sonja and Spider-Man defeat Kulan Gath and Mary Jane gets her body back...

Years later, a comic book with Peter and his ex acting like they weren't broken up would be an issue, but back in the newsstand days, everyone just enjoyed this awesome one-off story (which, okay, only happened because Claremont and Byrne liked the idea of a redhead becoming Red Sonja, but still).

WAS THIS A PARCTICULARLY GROOVY CHRISTMAS STORY?

Red Sonja debuted in the 1970s, so that's a big deal, I guess. And Mary Jane and Peter's fashions were pretty 1970s, but that's about it.

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