Writing for the Holidays

This time of year many people start talking about what holiday movies they like the most. Don’t get me wrong, I am no Scrooge, I love a good holiday movie as much as the next person. There is no doubt in my mind I will be watching Elf again this year. However, I have always been more fond of holiday episodes of long-running TV series. In the same way that we spend the holidays with people we love, it is nice to see how characters with whom we have a long serialized relationship react to holidays.

Especially in the case of sitcoms…what situation is greater for bringing out character than the winter holidays? They bring up so much about our families, friends, the past, how we express our gratitude, and what we may want out of the year ahead.

Like television, monthly comics used to have a lot more holiday issues. However, those issues started to fade away as we got hyper-concerned about continuity and asked fun questions like “Well, how many Christmases has Bruce Wayne had as Batman?” If you are looking for continuity, please know that we are going to be following the “I don’t care how many tenth birthdays Bart Simpson has had” mode of thinking moving forward in this piece.

Superhero comics still would do a holiday issue from time to time, but they were fewer and farther between. The holidays instead moved to anthologies where you could do short stories for a variety of characters. I grew up on them and they…had their hits and misses. At best you would get a collection with a few interesting stories and a nice note from the company in the back wishing you a happy holiday season. At worst, and I say this with deep affection having been an editor, you would get a pretty ragtag group of stories put together in a short amount of time.

As previously mentioned, in 2017, fellow former DC editor, Alex Antone and I were put in charge of editing the DC Holiday Special that year, simply titled DC Holiday Special 2017. We relished the opportunity and put our all into it, and the success of that 2017 issue led us to edit nine more seasonal anthologies. Some of my favorite comics I ever worked on.

And in that first-holiday anthology, we established great rules that led to a lot of success and led to great creators both new and icons to do fun work. Also, three of the short stories I wrote for DC were winter Holiday stories in these anthologies. So I thought for this piece, from my perspective as both a writer and former editor, I would talk about writing for the holidays. Especially because to my delight, these anthologies are still being published. And if you are an up-and-coming comic writer, your first mainstream job could very well be in one of these books. So let’s talk about the rules of the road.

The Rules

1. The story has to take place during the winter and involve one of the winter holidays as a part of the plot.

2. These are short stories. We want them to feel like they could happen in continuity, but we also do not want them to rock the boat. You cannot kill major characters, perform retcons/alter character histories, or simply shake things up in a dramatic manner. You can be additive, that is something we would love, but you need to be aware of the space.

3. The stories should come from the characters. How does the character in your story feel about the holidays and what does it bring out in them? We would like to avoid doing retellings of Holiday Classics with the DC characters replacing the characters in said stories. My go-to example was always that I did not want to do the Nutcracker starring The Flash.

4. Again, this is a short story, not a backdoor pilot. The stories should be really strong stand-alone pieces, that again we want to feel like canon, but we do not want to operate as the start of a longer potential story elsewhere.

What is the Difference Between Being Additive and Changing Things?

A world-class question. I am going to use two different stories to highlight the answer to this. The first is the Deathstroke story “A Very Wilson Family Christmas” from the DC Holiday Special 2017 by the creative team of Priest, Tom Grummett, Scott Hanna, Jeromy Cox, and Willie Schubert.

One thing we did in that first Holiday Special we worked on as editors was to see how many of the writers on the DC titles would be willing to contribute stories to the book starring the characters they were already writing. Our goal was to bring in newer writers as well but we hoped having current DC writers working on their characters would draw more attention to the book, and also it would make those specific stories feel more important. Asking Priest, who was in the middle of a brilliant run on Deathstroke to contribute a Deathstroke holiday story was a no-brainer and he came back with a great pitch. “Deathstroke points a gun at Santa Claus.” He had our attention immediately.

Years before Deathstroke became the primary antagonist of the New Teen Titans, when he was just a hired gun running dangerous jobs, while also being the father of a very complicated family, Deathstroke hid a Nuclear Trigger in his son Joey’s Christmas gift to keep it away from enemy forces. What he didn’t expect was that Joey would donate that gift to charity. Deathstroke and his associate Wintergreen have to track down the charity truck, driven by an innocent Mall Santa, and get the Nuclear Trigger before the opposing forces do. Meanwhile, Deathstroke is missing the Christmas trip with his family, his wife Addy, and his sons Grant and Joey are in a car yelling at him on a call to join them.

One of my favorite stories in this book and one of my favorite short stories I got to work on. It was everything we were looking for. We get to see Deathstroke before he’s the demon who hunts the Teen Titans, we learn more about his family life, but we are still in the middle of an adventure that makes sense for his character based on what we know about him. Nothing was changed about his character. This wasn’t the Christmas he decided that he hated teenage superheroes. It wasn’t the Christmas when he lost his eye. And it wasn’t Christmas when he decided orange and blue made for a great costume color scheme. However, it was very much a Christmas story. Our main character screwed up something regarding a gift and had to race to be with his family. And it was a Slade Wilson story. It wasn’t National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation starring Slade Wilson. Also, it didn’t hurt to have DC and Titans legend Tom Grummett pencil the hell out of this story. Look at that two-page spread, it’s gorgeous!

Also just another example of how Priest (also credited as Christopher Priest) is one of the all-time great comic book writers. If you haven’t read his full run on Deathstroke? You should consider gifting that to yourself this holiday season.

The second story is one of my own that we have talked about before. From DC’s Nuclear Winter Special the Green Arrow story “The Birds of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.” Like many of the anthologies we did, it had two themes. The first theme…the winter holidays. The second theme…all the stories had to take place in a somewhat broken future. Either pre-existing or brand-new. For Green Arrow I imagined the saddest future being one where he is an old, bitter, down-on-his-luck superhero, who has pushed everyone away and is now this living ghost who haunts Justice League holiday parties telling younger people they aren’t trying hard enough. His old frenemy Hawkman has convinced him to come to this year’s Justice League Holiday party under false pretenses. Hawkman wants Green Arrow and Black Canary to make peace with each other before it’s too late. And they do. They share a beautiful night reminiscing and apologizing about how things went poorly between the two of them.

I may not be old, but I know how the holidays often come with regret about the past. And how a good party and being forced to see someone can sometimes be the best thing for you. I drew from a lot of personal experience for this story and a lot of my fears about what my life might become if I don’t stay open as a person. And yeah…I did make a reference to a holiday classic in my title but that’s only because I had so many BIRD characters in this story. Hawkman, Black Canary…Black Canary’s Grandson will probably also eventually be a bird superhero. The math was SOLID.

In Conclusion

Alex Antone and I edited three winter holiday collections together. DC’s Holiday Special 2017, DC’s Nuclear Winter Special, and DC’s New Year’s Evil. Across those three books, we edited almost thirty winter holiday stories. Using similar rules for the other seasonal/holiday anthologies we did? We edited almost one hundred twenty short stories with the philosophy I outlined above. It led to many of my favorite comics I ever got to make, both as an editor and a writer.

And I am happy to report that DC still does these holiday anthologies. As I write this DC just put out the terrific DC’s ‘Twas The ‘Mite Before Christmas. Incredibly edited by Katie Kubert, Andrew Marino, Michael McCalister, and Ben Meares. Who have their own outstanding philosophies on how to put together these anthologies and have delivered even more of them than Alex and I did. Again, if you are an aspiring writer and get to someday contribute a holiday story to that terrific team of editors, I hope you found this newsletter today helpful.

That’s it for this week, we will be back again next week with something awesome!

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz