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 Totally Tubular 80s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1980s, possibly ones that have a specific 1980s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).

The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Miami Vice Santa Claus giving out 80s presents, like a Rubik's Cube and a Sony Walkman, to four superheroes with the most-80s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.

Each day, a door on the calendar will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

Here's the story for Day 9, Christmas 1988's Sable #14, "and the Creatures Were Stirring" by Marv Wolfman, Cherie Wilkerson, Bill Jaaska and E.R. Cruz.

Jon Sable was a creation of Mike Grell that he did for First Comics in the early 1980s, at the start of the independent comic book boom that coincided with the expansion of the direct market. Suddenly, there was a market out there that would support creator-owned titles and could get them into the hands of comic book fans (in the old days, being an independent comic book creator was incredibly difficult, as you would have to somehow get onto newsstands when newsstand rack space was one of the most coveted places in the world. Its somehow even MORE coveted nowadays).

Anyhow, the concept of the series is that Jon Sable is one of the world's greatest mercenaries. However, he also has a secret identity, and in that secret identity, he is a beloved children's book author who writes a series of books about cuddly elves under the name BB. Flemm.

The series was popular enough that they even did a TV adaptation of it and when the show was getting ready to come out, First Comics relaunched the series as Sable, since that's what the (short-lived) TV show was called (the original series was Jon Sable, Freelance). Marv Wolfman took over as the writer on the book, with Bill Jaaska on art.

In this issue, Sable is just coming back to New York City after being away on a mission and his various friends and acquaintances are dealing with his absence. His lover and agent is dealing with blow back on the children's books because some critics were claiming that elves were anti-Christian...

One of Sable's friends was gay, which was a big deal for a 1980s comic book series (Wolfman himself had backed off on the idea of having a gay Teen Titan around this same time)...

A mysterious figure dressed as Santa donated money at Christmatime in the poor neighborhoods and is attacked and his money stolen. He called up Sable and Sable then went full Punisher on the gang in some way over the top violence...

We then learn that the mystery Santa is actually a local police captain who, earlier in the issue, decried the secret Santa as liberal BS.

DOES ANYTHING IN THIS COMIC SCREAM 'TOTALLY TUBULAR 80s'?

Everything ABOUT Sable screams 80s. So, yes. Everything in the comic book.