The Comicon Advent Calendar 2022: Day 1 – Bone’s Christmas Delights…

We did it last year and it’s time to do it all over again – 25 Christmas comics for the 25 days of Advent… it’s the Comicon Advent Calendar 2022…

Right then, it’s the 1st of December, time to unveil the first Comicon Advent calendar comic of the year… and it’s time for a very special holiday comic from Jeff Smith’s Bone.

So, grab a mince pie, nestle close around the fire, ignore the wintery winds blowing cold outside, here we go again…

The 1993 Bone: Holiday Special was a 14-page special with Jeff Smith’s Bone cousins celebrating ‘the winter solstice’. There were only four pages of story along with various sketches and behind-the-scenes material, but they were four fabulous pages, getting in tradition, cynicism, commercialisation, and the true spirit of the season as well.

The strangest thing about this is that, although it was published really early on in the series (issue 13 of the 55 issue series had just come out), the story is actually one of the final pieces of the Bone Saga, the second to last chapter as found in the final volume Crown Of Horns and all the big Bone collections. Cleverly done, very cleverly done…

The Holiday Special was originally, as all Bone was, in glorious black & white, but over the years, I’ve really come to appreciate the great job Steve Hamaker’s done on the colour art, so we’ll mix and match here, highlights in b&w and then the whole thing in colour below.

Anyway, it’s Christmastime in the woods… with the Bone cousins learning all about different customs, complete with old cynical Phoney drilling down to the worst part of Christmas, all that money to be made, to be spent…

But of course, all that seasonal goodwill does rub off, and Fone Bone sneaks away to find those (stupid, stupid) rat creatures with a little gift of Christmas he knows they’ll love…

Ending with the perfect panel and a great line…

Yep, it’s just some stupid ritual us humans go through each year. But if it’s a ritual that helps us all to try to make the world a better place, then let’s embrace it.

We’ll have more of the Comicon Advent Calendar 2022 tomorrow, but we’ll end with the complete four pages of the Bone Christmas Special, this time from the coloured version…