It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is a Totally Tubular 80s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1980s, possibly ones that have a specific 1980s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Miami Vice Santa Claus giving out 80s presents, like a Rubik's Cube and a Sony Walkman, to four superheroes with the most-80s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.
Each day, a door on the calendar will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...
Here's the story for Day 7, "Wounded Wolf" by Chris Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith from Uncanny X-Men #205.
The "problem" with this one is that it is fairly light on Christmas-y stuff. For Christmas-related stuff, it's mostly the fact that Katie Power is on a Christmas trip to the city when she runs into Wolverine.
Anyhow, after leaving comics for a number of years to pursue other art projects, Barry Windsor-Smith made a triumphant return in the 1980s. He began a tradition where he would draw at least one issue of Uncanny X-Men a year for a few years there (sometimes more than one). Typically, his issues would be one-off stories. His most famous one was "Wounded Wolf," which introduced the modern depiction of Lady Deathstrike. Wolverine has always been best contrasted when used with young, female heroes and that was evident in this classic issue, where Katie Power (Energizer from the Power Pack) is separated from her class during a field trip to New York City for Christmas when she runs into Wolverine, who is being hunted by Deathstrike and the Reavers. Wolverine has been abused and is barely more than an animal at this point...
However, his instinctual need to protect Katie eventually leads to Wolverine making the conscious choice to be a human over an animal. Chris Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith really were a wonderful team together.
DOES ANYTHING IN THIS COMIC SCREAM 'TOTALLY TUBULAR 80s'?
I mean, it centers around one of the members of the Power Pack teaming up with Wolverine, ya know? You don't get much more 80s than a major mainstream comic book trying to get people to realize how great Power Pack was (that reminds me of a bit I should do about major mainstream comic books trying to get people to realize how great Power Pack was).