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).

For the first day, I'll show you the image itself...

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 in calendar form...

And now, Day 1 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

Our first story is 1972's Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #7 by Steve Englehart, George Tuska and Billy Graham.

This is still pretty early in the series' run, so a lot of the set-up is still being tied fairly directly to that original story, where Carl Lucas, an unfairly imprisoned man, volunteered to be experimented on by a kindly scientist named Dr. Noah Burstein to reduce his sentence. A sadistic prison guard tried to kill Luke during the experiment, but in a fluke of luck, the experiment instead gave Carl superpowers. He escaped from prison and took the name Luke Cage and became a mercenary in Harlem, helping people who rarely see superheroes out if they're willing to pay his fee (and, let's be honest, he typically would end up helping anyways because he was a good guy). Burstein moved to Harlem, as well, to open up a medical clinic with Dr. Claire Temple. Burstein agreed to keep Luke's secret and Luke and Claire began dating. Still, things were obviously quite unsettled for Luke, always having to wonder if people will figure out his secret, especially since he spends a lot of time hanging around his former prison doctor, ya know?

I really enjoyed the relationship between Luke and Claire in the early issues (Archie Goodwin wrote the series at first and Englehart had taken over with issue #5) and Englehart had a lot of fun with them just enjoying the winter weather together...

There is a very cute addendum to this bit when an old beat cop comes across them fooling around in the snow and tells them that they have to move along, making a joke about this being a "No Sparking Zone."

The main gist of the issue, though, is Luke keeps encountering these unusual guys all Christmas Eve. At first, he meets a man named Marley who is beating a paper boy for charging him fifteen cents for a paper ("I've never paid more than two cents!"). The man acts as if he is from the past. Later, Luke encounters a man who appeared to be a wounded former Vietnam vet who attacks him and Claire with a rifle. Finally, Luke meets a man from 1984, equipped with a laser gun. Luke stops them all, but, of course, they are all the same guy, reenacting the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future.

He then captures Luke and reveals that those were all tests to prove to himself that humanity needed to be destroyed...

That right there was where I think the story really fell apart a bit. It was a clever spin on A Christmas Carol by Englehart, but what in the world is the point of doing a "testing" plot line in the comic when the tests had no bearing on the result of the comic book? The villain was prepared to blow up New York City with a nuclear bomb that he stole following World War II (during the villain's time in the O.S.S.) and he first decided to "test" humanity and Luke Cage, as he freely admits, passed ALL OF HIS TESTS! So why, then, is he still blowing up New York City? There really isn't a good enough explanation.

Anyhow, right when the bad guy was about to destroy New York City, he is distracted by someone coming down the chimney! On Christmas Eve! Luke uses the distraction to break free and take the bad guy out.

So what's the deal? Was Santa Claus really there? Nope, it turned out that it was just a burglar, assuming that the apartment was empty during the holidays so that he could rob it. And yet, at the same time, isn't any miracle on Christmas, in and of itself, a Christmas miracle?

Luke certainly embraces the moment as he celebrates Christmas with this basically random crook.

The George Tuska and Billy Graham pairing was a great one. They did gorgeous work and I really liked the detail that Graham seemed to put into Tuska's characters. There is a sequence where Luke is at a Christmas party at what looks to be a bar (it's the featured image) and Tuska/Graham really draw the heck out of all of the people attending the holiday party and since they seem a bit more Graham-esque to me than Tuska-like, I tend to imagine that that was mostly coming from Graham.

WAS THIS A PARCTICULARLY GROOVY CHRISTMAS STORY?

I mean, it's an early 1970s Luke Cage Christmas comic book story, ya know? So I would say that it is pretty firmly a very 1970s comic book, which is actually why I chose this one to start us off on our journey. I suspect that future stories will be a tad more universal, story-wise, but hey, who knows? I 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