The Caped Christmasader

Christ­mas means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. For some it means cel­e­brat­ing love and peace. For oth­ers it means food and wine. But for me, Christ­mas means Batman.

From Bat­man #285: The Mys­tery of Christ­mas Lost.

Every year as Christ­mas gets closer I start see­ing the Dark Knight every­where; as if I’m wear­ing con­tact lenses with the bat sig­nal printed on. Obvi­ously this is founded on a child­hood of Christ­mases that all fea­tured Bat­man in some way or another – from play­ing with Bat­man action fig­ures received from Santa to draw­ing pic­tures of Bat­man with Der­wents received from Santa. But Bat­man and Christ­mas have a much deeper con­nec­tion than just my own (prob­a­bly com­mon) Bat­mana­nia under the Christ­mas tree. Christ­mas, as it turns out, is a big part of the Bat­man­verse and the comics­verse too.

Both Mar­vel and D.C.  have a long his­tory of putting out Christ­mas comics. Super­man was at the North Pole sav­ing Santa from Nazis back in the 1940s. D.C. has put out var­i­ous Christ­mas With the Super-Heroes col­lec­tions over the years. (That’s the cover of a 1974 edi­tion above). And here’s twelve of the best D.C. hol­i­day comics accord­ing to Comics Alliance.

Speak­ing of Christ­mas comics my favourite one of late is It’s Begin­ning to Look a Lot Like Zom­bies – an illus­trated col­lec­tion of Christ­mas car­ols told from a zombie’s point of view. It’s the lat­est in the trend of mix­ing zom­bies with well-known cul­tural cor­ner­stones. But that’s a dis­trac­tion from our Caped Christ­masader conversation.

It’s not only the Bat­man comics that are inex­tri­ca­bly linked to the fes­tive sea­son. The sec­ond Tim Bur­ton Bat­man movie, Bat­man Returns, is set in Gotham City dur­ing Christ­mas. And one of my favourite episodes of Bat­man: The Ani­mated Series was ‘Christ­mas With The Joker’. I rec­om­mend watch­ing the whole episode below.

For me Christ­mas con­tin­ues to the Bat time of the year. I already know that this year there will be Bat­man presents, chat­ter about Heath Ledger dur­ing Christ­mas lunch and quite pos­si­bly The Bat­man Board Game will get a play in the evening.

I sup­pose any pop­u­lar cul­tural icon that has lasted for so many years is bound to make a big appear­ance dur­ing the gift-giving sea­son. And when you walk through shop­ping cen­tres and see lit­tle chil­dren decked out in full Bat­man cos­tumes, hold­ing Mummy’s hand as she does her last-minute Christ­mas shop­ping, it’s evi­dent that Bat­man is going to be a yule­tide fix­ture for many years to come.