Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noel, Feliz Navidad… now let’s check out a dozen seasonal comic book covers.

Hope you get to enjoy the holidays with your friends and family — and please remember the folks out there who don’t enjoy our advantages. If you aren’t giving your compassion a good solid workout during the holidays, you’re doing Christmas wrong.

Hey, Merry Christmas Eve Eve! I know it’s the holidays, peace on earth, goodwill to men, and all that, but surely there’s some room for some mindless violence in all that, right? Well, maybe not in the usual way, but I believe I’ve found something that’s definitely mindless and fairly significantly violent to Christmas itself. So even though I don’t have the most battle-heavy battle ever, it’s still time for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

So from November 1961’s Adventure Comics #290 by Jerry Siegel and John Forte, let’s pay a visit to the Bizarro World, that strange cube-shaped world where Superman’s imperfect duplicate Bizarro lives with all the other imperfect duplicates. So how do Bizarros celebrate their imperfect duplicate of Christmas? Well, you’ve got to have a Bizarro-Claus…

And Bizarro-Claus needs to sing some Christmas carols, right?

Yes, that certainly helps get you into the Christmas spirit, doesn’t it? And hey, is Bizarro-Claus going to come down the chimney to bring us presents?

Well, of course, that makes perfect sense. No, wait, it makes imperfect sense!

Broken toys under Christmas cactus tree! This am just like least favorite Christmas ever! Me so sad me could laugh and laugh!

And now for traditional smelly Bizarro Christmas cards!

And that am how Bizarros use symbolic violence to make Christmas dumber and stinkier than ever! Unmerry Christmas from Bizarro World! Me hope you have lousiest, ugliest, and worst holiday ever! Hello!

Everyone raise your mugs for this December 25th — the day when we celebrate the birthdays of Isaac Newton, Clara Barton, Robert Ripley, Cab Calloway, and German scholar and physician Johann Jakob Reiske! Oh, yeah, and Christmas, too.

Let’s celebrate the traditional way — with comic covers!

Everyone have a wonderful day, enjoy some good meals and good company — and I know I ride this hobbyhorse a lot, but keep in mind your fellow travelers on this planet who don’t have things as nice as you do…

SpaceBooger has called a temporary truce on Friday Night Fights ’til the holidays are over, but that don’t mean we have to stop, right? HECK, NO! In fact, we’d be crazy to let Christmas get away without commemorating it with a little gratuitous violence!

So here’s tonight’s battle: Adventure Comics #82, from January 1943, by none other than Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Our setup: The Golden Age version of the Sandman — after he got rid of his classy trenchcoat, fedora, and gas mask costume in favor of the much-less-stylish spandex costume — and his sidekick Sandy are on the trail of a bunch of gangsters.

The mobsters have a pretty sweet idea — they recruited a broken-down wrestler named Mountain Man Bearde to dress up in a Santa Claus costume at the local department store. Bearde has enjoyed playing Santa and had no idea he was being used by crooks — but now they’ve dragged him back to the store at gunpoint so they can trick the night watchman into opening the doors for him. Sandman and Sandy make their appearance at last, and the fisticuffs get started:

But before the whole thing is over, the dime-store Santa gets his own revenge on the mobsters:

“And I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a GOOD FIGHT!”

Usually, all the awesome stuff I dig up here has been considered awesome for years, decades, centuries. But this is something that just caught fire in the last few weeks. I think I was aware of this before, but suddenly, I’m seeing references to it just about everywhere. What is it? We’re talking about the black sheep of the Christmas holiday — the Krampus!

Okay, fine, what’s the Krampus? It’s a Christmas legend, most common in Germany, Austria, and the Alps, about a monstrous creature who is a companion of St. Nicholas — where St. Nick brings presents to good children, the Krampus brings punishment to bad ones, usually, around December 5th of every year. He carries a bundle full of switches, and he’s sometimes depicted carrying bad children away.

In other words, he’s Incongruous Christmas Monster, complete with horns, obscenely long tongue, chains, bells, and the whole shebang. He’s such a badass that he hangs around a Christian saint — and no one can make him go away!

And Bill O’Reilly can’t even complain that Krampus is doing anything against Christmas! It’s not like he just showed up all of a sudden and started getting Christmas all monstered up — he’s been scaring waste fluids out of kids in the Alps every December for centuries! Bill O’Reilly better keep his distance from the Krampus anyway — he’s got way more fearmongering experience than the Falafel-Master…

And the Krampus isn’t just a feature in old artwork and legends — Christmas festivals in Germany will often include people who dress up in monster costumes and walk among the crowds along with St. Nicholas. Can you imagine that happening at a Christmas parade in America? “Merry Christmas, kids! Now here’s GWAR!“

I think that’s why Krampus is so awesome — it’s like taking Christmas and adding a heaping spoonful of PURE HEAVY METAL. Even the name — KRAMPUS — sounds like a heavy metal band, doesn’t it?

So hope you all have a wonderful Christmas Eve, filled with all the Christmas goodness you can get your hands on — and with extra helpings of Krampus Awesomeness.

SpaceBooger is going to start up the next official round of Friday Night Fights next week, but why don’t we jump the gun with a little seasonal mayhem?

From January 2002’s JLA #60 by Mark Waid, Cliff Rathburn, and Paul Neary: Santa Claus puts the hurt on a bunch of demonic elves!

You better not pout, you better not cry, you better watch out, I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming… to kick your ass.

Hey, it’s December 25th! You know what that means? That’s right, it’s Humphrey Bogart’s birthday!

Oh, and it’s Christmas, too! Let’s celebrate the traditional way — with a bunch of comic book covers!

Hope your holiday is all kinds of merry and festive, and hope Santa gets you everything you wanted!

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! You in the mood for some Christmas music? Me, too! But not any wimpy carols, man. I got a heavy metal heart, so get in the mosh pit, throw your horns up, and let’s have a headbanger’s holiday!

And before you start — no, no, no, not going to listen to anyone who wants to complain that this is anti-Christmas or anything like that. I like classical Christmas music a lot, but ain’t nothing better than a few non-traditional carols. And this stuff is light-years better than most of the Christmas country or pop music that’s cluttering up the radio these days.

So yeah. Heavy metal Christmases rock.

• I’ll Be Home for Christmas by Twisted Sister and Lita Ford
• Run Rudolph Run by Lemmy Kilmister, Billy F. Gibbons, and Dave Grohl
• Silent Night by Chuck Billy, Scott Ian, Jon Donais, Chris Wyse, and John Tempesta
• Little Drummer Boy by Doug Pinnick, George Lynch, Billy Sheehan, and Simon Phillips
• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Rudy Sarzo, and Simon Wright
• We Wish You A Merry Christmas by Jeff Scott Soto, Bruce Kulick, Bob Kulick, Chris Wyse, and Ray Luzier

If you ain’t in the Christmas spirit by now, turn in your headbanging license.

DC Universe Holiday Special ’09

Most years, these holiday specials are about as welcome as a stocking full of coal — atrocious writing, bad art, hackneyed holiday cliches. But this year’s edition is actually pretty darn good. This one has 16 different stories — Batman tracking a dishonest Santa; Superman fighting a snow-golem; the Flash doing a ton of holiday chores in a small amount of time; Beast Boy finding a new family with the Doom Patrol; the Martian Manhunter solving a Christmas crime; two different tales of holiday cheer during wartime, starring Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace; Deadman bringing comfort to a couple of lost souls; the Red Tornado trying to convince greedy shoppers to embrace the holiday spirit; Adam Strange trying to beat a deadline so he can make it back to the planet Rann for New Year’s; and many, many more.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This one is just amazingly good, with excellent art and writing. There are some clunkers here and there, but they’re not actually bad — just not real successes. And the good definitely outweighs the merely mediocre in this one. If I had to pick my favorites — the Doom Patrol story, Martian Manhunter, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, Red Tornado (he never puts on the stupid costume once!), and the Adam Strange story. The whole thing is a nice dose of holiday cheer.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #12

This is the comic based on the goofy Cartoon Network series. In their first Christmas issue, Batman starts out knocking the stuffing out of the Calendar Man who plans to destroy all the Christmas cards in Gotham City! ALL THE CHRISTMAS CARDS! (insert evil laughter here) And right when Batman is about to deliver the knockout punch, he gets transported off-planet by a Zeta Ray. Huzzah! Calendar Man is triumphant! And a second or two later, Earth is destroyed by a wave of antimatter. Is there no hope for a Merry Christmas?

Well, Batman arrives safely on the planet Rann, where Adam Strange reveals that the Psions have generated the antimatter wave which has already destroyed almost everything in the universe but Rann, which is resistant to antimatter because of its natural Zeta radiation. (No, that makes no sense, but it’s a comic book, so shush.) While Batman and Adam fight off antimatter shadow-demons, Adam’s wife Alana shows up to help. When they all make it to the Psion base, they learn that all the destroyed planets have been converted into pure information. Alana can use the Psion technology to reverse the deletion effects, but Batman and Adam will have to help out from inside the antimatter generator. Their recent exposure to Zeta radiation should protect them from instant destruction, but it won’t stop them from undergoing some unusual transformations…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Okay, it’s very silly stuff, but I still thought it was fun, funny, and pretty nicely Christmasy. I thought the transformations at the end were cute, and I enjoyed Batman’s appropriately gobsmacked musings about the Earth being destroyed. All in all, a cute dose of Christmas cheer.

Ahoy! It’s Christmas Day! Hope it’s merry for you, no matter what!

And if you think I’ve got the time to do anything more complicated than plug in a bunch of pictures of Christmas comics, you’ve got another thing comin’!

Merry Christmas again, and Happy Holidays! I’m gonna go play with my new Tickle-Me Power Girl…