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 2017’s Klaus and the Witch of Winter, the comic that dares to put Raymond Briggs in his place and admit that flying snowmen are scary.

As someone who learned all-too-young that Santa Claus wasn’t necessarily who I thought he was — we’ll say no more about that, but I still bear the emotional scars decades later; thanks, Craig — the idea of Santa as a figure that exists in the collective consciousness has always been a point of fascination for me. He straddles the gap between Mythical Figure and Cartoon Character, somehow bigger than both purely because so many of us have, at one point, willed him into being.

Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s Klaus fits into this space somewhere closer to the cartoon-y edge: he’s Santa as reimagined using superhero tropes and language, but still played as a mythical figure, as if Thor decided to get really seasonal and use the Silver Age Superman as his role model. As the series continues, Morrison and Mora fill in the gaps as to how Klaus actually operates, and how he co-exists with our traditional view of the character, as in Klaus and the Witch of Winter revealing that he’s basically franchised the “Santa Claus” role around the world to ensure that everyone gets their gifts in one night — and that means getting kids’ parents involved, too.

That’s how we get the above scene, featuring a classic piece of Morrisonian logic: if Santa is actually our parents all along, then that just proves that Santa has been real all along. After all, if our parents weren’t real, then how would we be here in the first place — and if our parents are Santa, that means that Santa has to be real. Don’t think about it too much. Have another mug of egg nog, instead.

Want more? You can read the entire issue in Klaus and the Witch of Winter, available via Comixology.

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