The Last Christmas No. 1
Image Comics
In the pop-culture genre of postapocalyptic adventure, whether it's an apocalypse caused by nuclear war or zombie holocaust, and whether it's told in film, television or comics, they never, ever show what Santa Claus is up to once the world ends, do they? If the sun is blacked out and humanity is fighting each other in the streets over the last few edible rat corpses, does that mean the Christmas spirit is dead, too? Does Santa turn a blind, all-seeing eye on the troubles of the world?
No one's dared asked—until the writing team of Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn (Mr. Show, The Comedians of Comedy) decided to tackle the issue in The Last Christmas, a bit of oddly timed humbuggery (um, it's only June, guys) about what becomes of Santa once the world ends.
As a Rankin and Bass-style singing snowman narrates, Christmas and Santa endure so long as kids continue to believe, delivering baseball bats to little boys to beat away the zombies at their doors. But when marauding mutants visit the North Pole and kill Mrs. Claus (plus plenty of elfin toymakers), Santa becomes despondent, repeatedly trying to take his life—too bad he's immortal. With no Christmas and no missus, Santa has nothing left ... nothing but revenge! When it comes to pain, it's better to give than receive, and, in this comic book, no one is more generous than Santa Claus.
Wonderland No. 1
Slave Labor Graphics/Disney
Remember in Alice in Wonderland (either the Lewis Carrol book or the Disney cartoon), where the White Rabbit sees Alice in his pad and mistakes her for his housekeeper, Mary Ann? Me, either, but Autumn creator Tommy Kovac sure does, and he builds a whole new spin on Disney's version of Carroll's fantasy out of it.
In Wonderland, one of four new series born of the incredibly unlikely alliance of corporate behemoth Disney and small press comics company SLG, Kovac introduces us to Mary Ann, a shy, persnickety-to-the-point-of-obsessive-compulsive maid in the Rabbit's employ. A series of misunderstandings perpetuated by Tweedles Dee and Dum leads her and the Rabbit into the bad graces of the Queen of Hearts, who never quite recovered from her encounter with "the Alice monster."
Carroll's Wonderland has long been a favorite playground of comics artists, but two things distinguish this new series. One is its unusual pedigree, being a sort of diagonal continuation of the 1951 Disney film, and the other is artist Sonny Liew's elegant, sketchy, storybook-like art. Liew, whose previous work incluces the acclaimed Malinky Robot and My Faith in Frankie, filters the original Disney designs through his own style, coming up with something that bears both the official stamp and indie street cred. That makes Wonderland a pretty wonderful-looking comic-book series.
Carl Barks' Greatest Duck Tales Stories Vol. 1
Gemstone Publishing
If the Disney company and good comic books seems strange to us today, in an era where the House That Mickey Built has turned into a merchandising business that occasionally pumps out feature-length commercials for said merchandise, it probably shouldn't. After all, one of the most important, influential and beloved masters of the comic-book/sequential-art medium is best known for his decades of comics based on Disney's duck characters.
Carl Barks, the creator of Donald Duck's penny-pinching, two-fisted Scottish Uncle Scrooge, was the king of funny animal comics, turning gag strips about Donald and his three identical nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie into epic globe-trotting adventures.
Many of Barks' better stories were plundered in the '80s by Disney's TV animation studio (hence, comics adapted from cartoon characters were then adapted back into cartoons) and turned into the after-school series Duck Tales. Gemstone Publishing reprints many of the original Barks tales in this volume; it's a nice introduction to some of the best stories involving talking ducks ever told.