Today, we look at an impressive moment by Cannonball at Christmatime.

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

Today, we look at 1996's "When Strikes the Gladiator" by Scott Lobdell, Joe Madureira and Tim Townsend from Uncanny X-Men #341.

This is issue is an intentional homage by Lobdell to another Christmas X-Men classic, which interestingly enough was the second time that Lobdell had done this. One of the other stories that I have featured earlier on this look at 1990s Christmas stories was a 1991 Lobdell story set right before the events of X-Men #98. Here, Lobdell is having the X-Men visit New York on Christmas just like they did in X-Men #98, including a visit to Rockefeller Center just like in #98.

The story ends with the X-Men begin transported into outer space for a grand adventure, which was kind of sort of like what happened in X-Men #98 (although there, "outer space" was just a space station orbiting Earth). As noted, everything begins with the X-Men at Rockefeller Center, with people enjoying Christmas by ice skating...

By the way, this was at a weird point in the history of the X-Men where Lobdell was basically writing both X-Men titles, with Fabian Nicieza off of X-Men and Mark Waid never quite taking over that book. Anyhow, the X-Men then all split up. Cannonball, who had only recently been promoted to be a member of the main X-Men team (which, on the one hand, worked really well, but on the other hand, it definitely didn't exactly flow naturally from being the guy who took over the leadership of X-Force when Cable went missing soon before the X-Cutioner's Song. That Sam Guthrie didn't seem like the type to be all, "Oh, I got promoted? Okay, see ya suckers!" to the rest of his team), went to a toy store to do some shopping for his many brothers and sisters...

His shopping was interrupted, though, by a stargate, through which Gladiator emerged!

The majority of the issue was devoted to Cannonball fighting against Gladiator (including a bit where Cannonball takes advantage of Gladiator's powers in one of the most clever bits that Lobdell ever came up with during his X-Men run. That's not meant as a backhanded compliment, by the way, as Lobdell had a number of clever bits. This was just one of the best). Gladiator, you see, had been set up by John Byrne as to have sort of confidence-driven powers. In other words, his abilities came from his confidence in his abilities. If you could then shake that confidence, his powers would be affected as a result.

Here, then Cannonball uses his ability to create a "nigh invulnerable" force field to put all of his powers into taking a hit from Gladiator so that it would shake Gladiator that Cannonball was still standing, at which point Cannonball would strike, before Gladiator's confidence could rise. The key part of this, and why I like this a lot more than similar stories of underpowered heroes taking out a bigger threat is that Lobdell really isn't saying that Cannonball would even necessarily WIN this fight, just that for at least a moment, he was on par with Gladiator, even if Gladiator would cream him the next second.

Also, by the way, Joe Madureira drew the heck out of the fight scene. He has always been one of the most dynamic artists working in comics and this fight was a highlight of those skills.

However, there was more going on in this issue than JUST a big superhero misunderstanding fight. There was also time given to Rogue spending the holiday with Joseph, who was believed to be an age-reduced Magneto at the time (and, let's be honest, totally WAS an age-reduced Magneto at the time, until they decided that he WASN'T). They go on a classic New York City Christmas date...

Then, Joseph introduces a special alien device that can remove Rogue's powers temporarily!

Adorable moment, and I like how there is the added conflict in this joy about Rogue and Gambit also having their own thing that Magneto is sort of getting in the middle of, emotionally. When they are handled well, love triangles can be very compelling (they are almost never handled well). Boy, Joe Madureira was really in the zone during this point of his run on Uncanny X-Men, not just with the action stuff that I mentioned earlier, but also with this character-based emotional stuff. He was firing on all pistons.

Anyhow, once Cannonball seemingly takes out Gladiator in the fight, the other X-Men show up at the scene of the damage and they are all taken into outer space (except Cannonball, who Gladiator felt was too young to send into battle). This sets up a story that leaves Bishop written out of the X-Men for a while and it was also one of the last stories of Lobdell's run on Uncanny X-Men (which lasted for roughly 70 issues, which is a very strong run).

This story is more about non-Christmas stuff, but the Christmas stuff in the book was so strong that it really did work well as a Christmas comic book adventure.