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Today, we learn why Darkseid fears, of all people, Santa Claus!
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 Very Dope 90s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1990s, possibly ones that have a specific 1990s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).
This year’s Advent Calendar, of Grunge Santa Claus giving out 90s present, like a Tamagotchi, while posing with four superheroes with the most-90s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.
And now, Day 19 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)…
Today, we look at 1997’s “Present Tense” from DCU Holiday Bash #2 by Ty Templeton.
One of the interesting things about Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, as a whole, is that the whole major conflict between the heroes of New Genesis and the villains of Apokolips is centered on the escape from Apokolips by the young man known as Scott Free. Scott was the son of Highfather of New Genesis and we learned in New Gods #7 (by Kirby and Mike Royer) that the war between the two planets of the Fourth World had a truce that based on “The Pact” (amusingly, the same basic idea of this comic book story was used in Season 4 of Fargo as a setup between warring crime families in Kansas City over the years), which is that Darkseid, leader of Apokolips, would trade his son, Orion, to Highfather and Highfather would give his son, Scott, to Darkseid. So long at their sons were in the custody of the other leader, the truce remained intact.
Here was the big twist, though. Darkseid NEEDED a truce, as the war was so devastating on both sides that Apokolips was essentially just a pile of ruins and Darkseid didn’t want victory if it meant that he was overseeing a garbage pile. He wanted time to build the planet back up so that his victory would have some meaning. Meanwhile, he came up with a plan to essentially torment young Scott so much that Scott would have to be a fool NOT to eventually try to escape from Apokolips. So Darkseid knew that the truce would be broken and that it would not be broken by him (technically). Still, that gave him however long it took Scott Free to come to maturity to deal with solidifying his position.
Therefore, though, that means that there are a good amount of years that are unaccounted for in Darkseid’s life (and since we don’t exactly know how New Gods age, that could have been a whole lot of years), and as a result, it seems clear that Darkseid made some fascinating acquaintances over those years. Darkseid has long been fascinated with Earth due to its connection to the Anti-Life Equation, and in the comic book series, Eclipso, we saw Eclipso (who was the original God’s Wrath on Earth before The Spectre) playing chess with a mysterious being and in Eclipso #10 (by Robert Loren Fleming, Colleen Doran and Ray Kryssing), we see that it was Darkseid he was playing…
Later on, Darkseid was revealed to have been even more directly connected to the creation of Eclipso (in a retcon way), but at the time, it was just a statement about how Darkseid is the type of guy who has chess games with mystical beings like Eclipso. You know, as you do.
Therefore, that makes sense when we saw who Darkseid was connected to in the Ty Templeton short story, “Present Tense,” which opened up by showing the dangerous world of Apokolips with its guard up. Their efforts were to no avail, however, for their defensive perimeter had been breached! A foot soldier reported this news to Darkseid and it was only through the despot’s great “mercy” that the soldier was merely burned alive rather than being outright atomized (it is a great bit to see the soldier be so grateful that Darkeid let him sort of kind of survive). Another soldier told Darkseid that not only had the perimeter been breached, but also their target was now in the room with them!
Who was this mysterious target?
Why, none other than Santa Claus himself! Hilariously enough, Santa Claus determined that he had to visit everyone on his “Naughty or Nice” list, even if that meant fighting through missiles and lasers and force fields. Good ol’ Saint Nick then promptly checked his list and saw that, yep, the evil Darkseid was in fact “naughty” this year. He then gave him his coal and got the heck out of there.
What a delightful story by Templeton, but it is interesting to see just how complicated Santa Claus’ whole deal is that he not only covers all of Earth but Apokolips, as well? That doesn’t seem to track, so I think that it probably has something to do with Darkseid’s apparent frequent sojourns to Earth. I imagine he and Santa Claus got into it at some point in those years and this is Santa Claus’ way of paying the villain back for whatever went down between the two. It makes more sense to me than Santa Claus showing up on one of the most evil planets in the universe and ONLY bringing a single lump of coal for just Darkseid.
Or perhaps Santa Claus is just a really easy grader and only people like Darkseid actually qualify as truly “naughty”? I don’t know the answer, but this hilarious short story (which sure does pack a whole lot of story into just two pages, right?) certainly brings up a lot of interesting thoughts about the very nature of ol’ Kris Kringle.
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