Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at how the holiday season could be better.
 
At this very special time of the year it's traditional for old guys and bitter pundits like me to lament over the ever increasingly early opening of the Christmas Season (i.e., "have you seen ______ already has their Christmas decorations up?"), but this will be the absolute last year that I or anyone else will be able to do that.  Because this year it started on November 1st and will clock in at a full two months, I use to "joke" that Christmas and Hollywood movie blockbusters were the last two economic engines keeping America from turning its OPEN sign over to CLOSED, but once again life imitates snide remarks.  It's no coincidence two months is usually the length of time a studio needs to properly exploit an upcoming movie from first teaser trailer to its actual release.
 
Because Christmas is now a brand, a limited edition product and it can literally expand no further without encroaching on Halloween’s territory and considering what Corporate America rakes in on it you know that’ll never happen.  Seriously, if there's ever going to be an actual "War on Christmas" it will involve Halloween and Christmas slugging it out for holiday supremacy.  Any artist who would like to help me turn The War between Halloween and Christmas into next year's high concept dark comedy surprise hit Image miniseries, you know how to reach me.
 
There were all kinds of indicators this was the year everything changed, like the early roll-out of the cranberry infused sodas.  Joining Cranberry Ginger Ale and Sierra Mist this year is Cranberry Sprite (if you can only try one, go with Sierra Mist; as far as I'm concerned the Sprite is only good for putting out fires), and the introduction of pumpkin flavored tortilla chips.  The usual suspect local radio channels switched to an all Christmas music format and the ones that didn't started their "Christmas Cash Giveaways."  The Hallmark Channel also went into Christmas movie mode a month early (including, ironically enough, one from 2010 titled November Christmas) and it seems like every retail outlet will be open on Thanksgiving.  Black Friday is no longer enough, now every chain has to "win the weekend."  Kind of like the way Hollywood studios have been pushing back the opening day of their major releases to Thursday so they could artificially inflate their weekend takings.
 
And of course the one who suffers most is Thanksgiving, the poor orphan holiday.  Adding injury to this insult, Disney XD has transmogrified it into "Pranksgiving."  Making this, its second year even "bigger and better" (according to a press release anyway), hyperactive mock muppet Crash from the tween-com Crash & Bernstein* joins with NBA stars I’ve never heard of to form a special "Pranking Crew."  The month long event features prank themed episodes of their usual shows along with a Candid Camera type show called Just Kidding and the launch of a Japanese-style game show called Japanizi: Going, Going Gong.  I honestly can't decide whether Japanizi is culturally insensitive or just clueless.  I'll admit that having been the victim of entirely too many of them I'm not particularly fond of pranks.  In the hierarchy of humor I rank them just beneath prop comics and comics with guitars.  But even if I thought them all in good fun I'd find something offensive about reducing a prayer of gratitude and appreciation to a month long celebration of cruel, stupid and destructive stunts.  Just the sort of behavior you want kids to emulate.
 
This is usually the part of the rant where the bitter old pundit curses the degenerate times he lives in and weeps for generations unborn, but I'll do neither.  Things change and do not change back and barring something along the lines of a zombie apocalypse we'll never go back to the good old days when the Christmas tree went up on Christmas Eve after the kids had gone to bed.  I don't care much for this state of affairs, but while I can't do anything about it there is something we all could do: cut ourselves in on a piece of the action.
 
It should of course start with the publishers, as in, give us more Christmas-themed products to sell.  You say Christmas stories with superheroes don't sell?  Fine, why not give them away?  We give comics away on Free Comic Book Day and Halloween, so why not provide a little something for the kids at Christmas?  It would also be a perfect time to release collections of classic stories, like Craig Yoe's The Great Treasury of Christmas Comic Book Stories from 2010.  I find it faintly criminal that no-one has collected Santa Claus Funnies, Bugs Bunny Christmas Funnies or DC's Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in a similar format.  Not to mention some cheap (or free!) digital editions of them as well as a "Give the Gift of Comics" campaign directed at older readers.
 
But it wouldn't hurt if we made more of an effort either.  Except for the occasional sale, traditionally comic book shops don't really "do" Christmas.  I've been in a lot of them at Christmas and don't believe I've ever seen much in the way of decorations, let alone an actual tree.  Which makes sense since historically our base has been adolescents or those practicing the adolescent lifestyle.  For them a comic book shop can serve as a refuge for those suffering from Christmas Claustrophobia.  Which is fine, though it does kind of reinforce a lot of stereotypes about comic book shops being "Ugly Boy Stores" when we should be opening ourselves to the possibilities of new customers.  Ones who might actually want to see a little Christmas cheer on display.
 
The one thing I really want for Christmas?  Information about the solicited-in-2010-but-never-published miniseries Santa Claus vs. the Martians by Benito Cereno and James Harren, a wild, revisionist take on Santa Claus who, among other things, fights a Martian invasion.  I just checked the Internet and could find no updates about it but, oddly enough, I was able to find covers for all four issues.
 
* Crash & Bernstein is a live action series about a 14-year-old boy who wishes for a brother, which arrives in the form of a loud, crude and destructive living purple puppet thing.  I know these sorts of shows aren’t intended for me and I should ignore it, but every time I see Crash I have to restrain myself from screaming "Kill it!  Kill it with fire!"
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.