23/12/2025
It's the yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar, only this year I'm doing it on the Comics Should Be Good page! Here's Day 21! I'm counting down the most heartwarming Christmas moments from Marvel and DC comics (you'd be surprised by how relatively few heartwarming Christmas moments there are in DC and Marvel comics).
Today, we go with a bit of a controversial pick, 1989's "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot" from Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2, by writer Alan Brennert, artist Dick Giordano, colorist Tom McGraw and letterer Steven Haynie.
This, of course, is the iconic Deadman/Supergirl Christmas team-up.
Boston Brand, the superhero known as Deadman, is almost inherently one of the most tragic superheroes in the DC Universe, because his whole DEAL is that he is literally dead, but just unable to fully pass on to the afterlife, doomed instead to roam the Earth as a ghost. However, one thing that he CAN do is to possess people, and briefly live life as a human in someone else's body. In this Christmas story, he takes over the body of a corporate raider, someone who buys companies using junk bonds and then scuttles the company they acquire. Really gross dudes. So Brand feels no problem with taking over this body and then using his bank account to buy Christmas presents for all of his old friends in the circus.
However, while Brand has no problem using a greedy jerk's bank account, a whole other issue is when he takes over NORMAL people's bodies during the holidays. Brand wants to experience some of what life has to offer, like holiday celebrations, but eventually, the guilt just eats him alive. What right does he have to essentially steal this guy's Christmas from him?
So ultimately, Brand gives up the possessions before he takes up too much of people's Christmases. This is what makes him such a tragic character.
Unlike perhaps some other tragic characters, Brand also stands out by how vocal he is ABOUT his own tragedy. We see him rail against the people who cursed him to use these powers for good. While he is complaining, though, he is shocked when a young woman comes up to him and begins to talk to him in his ghost form!
This mysterious woman really twists Brand's head around, trying to get to the root of Brand's problems, because she can tell that Brand really truly DOES like the ability to help others that comes from his tragic lot in life.
He explains that he just hates that no one will ever know that he is involved in 90% of the good that they do, but the woman explains that that is not heroes do what they do, they do what they do because it needs to be done, whether people will remember it or not.
Newly inspired, Brand does to thank her, but she is already on her way, although she tells him her name as she goes, it is Kara.
Of course, this was obviously Kara Zor-El, the Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Supergirl, who died during that crossover and was then wiped from DC continuity at the time. DC was so weird about her usage that Mark Waid, who edited this comic book and Secret Origins, even joked about it by having her name be "banned" from the Secret Origins letter column as a gag.
This is perhaps the greatest Christmas comic book story ever, but I dunno, there's just a bit too much bittersweetness mixed in here for me to rank it higher on a list of the most HEARTWARMING Christmas comic book moments. So I'm leaving it at five. That's no statement about the quality of the issue, as it is excellent.
