"If these shadows remain unaltered..."

Have you ever seen The Haunted Closet? You know the blog I mean. That old, dark blog that’s usually at the bottom of the search results. The owner hasn’t posted in years; no one really knows why. The links are broken and boarded, and some of the older embedded graphics have changed into placeholder icons. The comments section has grown wild, piling up with unmonitored spam, making strange offers in the night.

Whew—that old Haunted Closet gives me the creeps!

Okay, I’m prying the two by fours off the front door, lighting up the fireplace, and giving the foyer a thorough dusting and cobwebbing* (*if “dusting” means to remove dust, “cobwebbing” should mean the same for spider webs, right?) in order to announce that…

After years of dreaming, dithering and delaying, I finally broke out the thirty dollar USB tablet and drew myself a comic book (or, I should say, another comic book.)

Unlike my Thundarr-meets-Chuck Norris prior title, this one is a tragi-cringe-comedy imagining the difficulties a certain miser named Ebenezer Scrooge faces in the days immediately following his come-to-Christmas moment as depicted at the climax of the Charles Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol”.

While I only got around to reading the original novella as an adult, I grew up consuming various adaptations of this holiday classic, and it may very well be the first ghost story (and time travel story) I’d ever been exposed to.

The earliest version I remember seeing is also my favorite, the 1938 film starring Reginald Owen as Scrooge and Gene Lockhart as his long-suffering employee Bob Cratchit. It is appropriately spooky where it needs to be (the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come depicted here ranks as one of the most spine-tingling iterations) but peppered with enough humor and heart to strike a pleasing balance. This is my “default” version that I compare all other adaptations against.

My second favorite would have to be the 1984 made-for-TV version starring George C. Scott. Scott gives us a more restrained performance of Scrooge, his Christmas morning transformation being less hyperkinetic than we’ve been conditioned to expect. But this version includes certain details from the book often omitted in other adaptations, like the disturbing feral children embodying “Ignorance” and “Want” hidden under the Ghost of Christmas Present’s robes. And the specter of Scrooge’s dead business partner, Jacob Marley (Frank Finlay), all clambering and caterwauling, is truly horrifying. 

Of the animated adaptations, too many to inventory here, Mr. Magoo’s cute musical play-within-a-play (1962) and Richard William’s grim but faithful rendition (1971) sit at opposite ends of a spectrum between which all other versions can be plotted.

SOMETHING ABOUT A COMIC BOOK?

Oh yea, the comic book thing. As much as I enjoy “A Christmas Carol”, I always thought the ending was wrapped up just a little too neatly. Ebenezer Scrooge, as you’ll remember, was a cold, cruel miser who had distanced himself from everyone around him. His prizing of money over all other concerns has left him a lonely, friendless bachelor, whose business interests have seen families evicted from their homes, children succumb to sickness and disease, and the poor resigned to debtors’ prisons.

But in the course of a few hours, he undergoes a miraculous transformation brought on by three visiting spirits (four if we count Jacob Marley’s pre-show warm-up) who take Scrooge on a tour through time and space, granting him a fresh perspective on his past, present, and future. Christmas morning, Scrooge is a changed man who sets about righting a lifetime of wrongs. 

But what about all the people he’s harmed who didn’t have the benefit of experiencing a life-altering supernatural adventure? How do they react while Scrooge is suddenly, inexplicably skipping down the street like a giddy schoolboy with “Merry Christmas” on his lips? Their acceptance of Scrooge’s sudden change of heart won’t be easily won. 

And what about ol’ Ebenezer himself? Being kind and generous is not his nature. He’ll have to work hard fanning the delicate flame that sparked his heart in the afterglow of that miraculous visit with the spirit world, lest it extinguishes itself.

This is what I wanted to explore. In comic form.

I initially envisioned an ongoing serial of undetermined length, like a daily newspaper strip, following Scrooge’s misadventures as his attempt to reinvent himself butts up against a real world that repeatedly pushes back. Those strips could go on indefinitely. Full color on Sundays.

But I knew how I wanted it to begin, and I knew how I wanted it to end, and those segments comprise a self-contained story, whose meandering middle chapters could be fleshed out later.

So, these twenty-six pages encompass the “bookend” chapters, beginning the morning after Christmas, when Ebenezer first reveals his transformed self to a confused Bob Cratchit, and ending at an uncomfortable New Years Eve party hosted by his sympathetic nephew Fred (an event never mentioned in the original Dickens text.) You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you just might tear up a little.

This will be a printed, hard-copy comic book, not some vaporous digital download. And the art will be in my barely passable “I could draw that” style (because yes, I could, and yes, I did!)

Details to follow!