Every day of December counting down to Christmas Day, Popverse is hijacking the grand tradition of the Advent Calendar to share a moment from a holiday comic of yore. What else could you want from a classic combination of comic books and the yuletide gaze? Today, it’s the turn of 1991’s The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special #1.

There’s a scene at the opening of the 1988 holiday classic Scrooged that is intended to show how cynical, cruel, and heartless American television of the late ‘80s had become: a show titled 'The Night The Reindeer Died,' in which terrorists attack the North Pole, and only a gun-toting Santa and Mrs. Claus can keep Christmas alive… along with the help of then-TV star Lee Majors. It’s a quick, two-minute gag before the movie really gets started.

The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special #1 is what happens when those two minutes get expanded out into a full comic, which then decides that it needs to go even harder. Fresh of the success of the first Lobo miniseries, Keith Giffen, Alan Grant, and Simon Bisley re-teamed for a story that asks the important question: what happens when the Easter Bunny hires an unstoppable bounty hunter to take out Santa once and for all?

Beyond the hyper violence and various over-the-top touches — Santa has a roommate who’s a gorilla called Kong, because of course he does — one of the joys of the whole thing is that this particular Santa, and all of the Elves in his workshop, pretty much deserve everything they get; they’re the sort of North Pole citizens that the real Santa would ensure gets a lump of coal or three. Wait, did I say “real” Santa? I mean, the other Santa, the nicer one… Obviously…

Want more? You can read the entire issue in The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special #1, available via Comixology and DC Universe Infinite.

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