Tis The Season To Be Freezin' #1

I'll give DC Comics some props- they still managed to put out a holiday special once again! Marvel Comics has been a Scrooge going on 4 or 5 years now. But I must say that DC's Tis The Season To Be Freezin' has got to be the worst holiday offering in many years!

There are 8 short stories in this book. The best was the opening salvo from Paul Dini. It's from the Batman: The Animated Series universe, with art to boot. Tim Drake is in downtown Gotham looking for a gift for Bruce Wayne when Mister Freeze begins to wreak some icy havoc. 

Also in the high level of quality was a Jeff Trammel (Truth & Justice) penned Christmas Eve encounter between Firestorm and newly reformed Killer Frost as both have agreed to monitor duty at JLA headquarters. Then Vixen and the Super-Pets had an interesting team-up in Iceland for a story by Tee Franklin (Harley Quinn: The Animated Series Kiss, Kill Bang Tour). I liked it enough to say that I'd love a limited series starring this group in the future as Vixen can speak with the pets. Come on DC- give this a chance!

A heatwave struck Central City tale between The Flash and Captain Cold was pretty good. It was written by SNL alum Bobby Moynihan. However this story was peppered with digs against science deniers, Karenism and other feeble attempts at post-2020 humor. Stick with character development and leave the politics to Weekend Update.

I also enjoyed the Legion of Superheroes story. Though I didn't really connect with the story so much as I wasn't familiar with the main character of Polar Boy.

Stories starring personal favorites of mine such as Bizarro and Harley Quinn were hard to read-literally. I've always complained that whomever writes Bizarro doesn't do enough with his vocabulary to be reverse enough. (You know up is down, bad is good.) But writer Amedeo Turturro (Batman: Three Jokers) figured out a way to turn things up to 11 in this global warming Bizarro World story and I couldn't keep up with the opposites. 

With the Harley story, I feel that editors edited out some important information to this story. There were just too many awkward jumps in scene. I wonder if this was supposed to be a 16-pager and it got chopped in half. It did not flow well at all.

Lastly we have the JLQ story. It's an ad-hoc team of LGBTQ+ heroes. Earlier this year (I think), DC Comics had a contest where fans could vote for a new series. The Justice League Queer was one of the voting options. It was eliminated in the first round. But DC cried foul with the fans and have continued to pursue making this idea a reality. I personally think it's not fair to the other 14 projects that also voted down and have been buried in the vaults. If DC decides to do the Round Robin vote again (and I think they should) it should be if you lose- YOU LOSE! Too bad, so sad.

Anyways, the story was in desperate need of introduction. If I am not mistaken, this is only the second appearance of the JLQ. There's so many C-list or lower characters in this thing, a line-up card, similar to what used to happen in the pages of Justice League of America is needed here. One of the characters is not a part of the JLQ- it's Sigrid Nansen AKA Ice Maiden, AKA Ice. There is such a major change to the character, which normally I would be okay with. But This character also appears in some current issues of The Human Target. Once again, DC just jumbles the timelines and the issues currently on shelves don't have any connectivity. 

All 8 stories have an ice/snow theme. Thus, there's dozens of warnings about climate change. Thankfully, DC stayed away from Trump, The Alt-Right and COVID. But with the level of snide comments about people who don't think the way the creative team at DC does with this book, I had to double-check to make sure that I wasn't reading an Axel Alonso edited Marvel property. 

I read other current DC works. They don't have this level of 'wokeness' to them. I don't think DC realizes that their holiday specials are big opportunities for gaining new readership. There are a lot of folks who haven't bought a comic book in years. But they'll go for a holiday comics because of the nostalgia. You'll always get a Harley Quinn and a Batman story. Sadly, DC adds a lot of unfamiliar characters and unproven talent to fill in the rest of the 75% of the book. 

These specials are $9.99. At some point, I am going to stop buying these. The recent Halloween book was a stinker and this one is far from perfect. Would it kill DC to put something festive on the cover? Yes- I am thankful that DC Comics put out another holiday special. But did it have to be such a waste of my hard earned cash in an age of rampant inflation and a time where quality is lacking? 

Take my advice- if you haven't bought this book yet- don't! Wait till it hits a bargain bin. You'll have a much more merrier Christmas if you do!

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.