Here I am, back again and filled with residual holiday spirit. Hope everyone had as delightful a holiday as I did, with roasted beasts and dogs and children underfoot and a nice soft couch to curl up on at night. As a special super-late present to you all, here is the post that I intended to put up on Christmas Day:

There are a lot of Batman Christmas comics out there, and a lot of good ones, but I have to say that this is my favourite. It's part of a small subgenre of super-hero Christmas tales in which everything is magical and peaceful and nobody commits a crime due to seasonal Santa voodoo, only with Batman singing.

We open with Commissioner Gordon laying a cunning trap in order to de-Grinch the Dark Knight Detective, if only for one night. I think that this is really where this issue gets me, as I grew up with a post-Miller Batman who would have called Gordon weak and smashed the Bat-signal for this. Instead:

We get the best "aw, shucks" face that Bats has ever sported, and the entire rest of the story consists of he and the GCPD's Finest belting out seasonal tunes.

Well, almost the whole issue. A series of silent montages reveal all of the things that might have happened if there wasn't so much Xmas cheer floating around the city: a group of children return a present that they have stolen, a man refrains from shooting and robbing a blind man collecting for charity and a woman does not commit suicide. It really does convey the spirit of the season.

Also: in Gotham City a blind man not being shot and robbed constitutes a Christmas miracle.

Merry retroactive Christmas, everyone.