Aliens from Titan, Saturn’s moon, are stealing sunlight or some perfectly reasonable thing (if’n yer plastered on egg nog) and Klaus is helping a maudlin snowman through some feels. That’s right, he’s made of snow. Look, it’s Grant Morrison ok, that man did some serious damage to his brain doing any number of drugs in the ‘90s! So it’s the second year in a row where the Klaus Christmas Special is unfortunately not very special!
Klaus and The Crying Snowman is basically Grant Morrison doing a Christmas-themed Justice League book which, if you know anything about Morrison’s Justice League, tends to be very hit or miss; in this instance, it’s a miss.
Klaus is an invincible protagonist who mindlessly battles one-dimensional monsters which makes for zero tension in the feeble plot – even if you’ve never read a Klaus comic before you realise pretty soon that he’s only ever going to effortlessly succeed in whatever he does – while the other characters are bland nobodies. The action is unexciting, the heroes vs villains trope is generic at best and the “conflict” with the Titan aliens was resolved anticlimactically.
Dan Mora’s art is fantastic as always. The character designs are intricate and beautifully detailed – the snowman design is interesting and the tree monsters look amazing – and, while the fight scenes did nothing for me, they looked brilliant. I like how Morrison continues to cleverly weave in the famous aspects of Father Christmas into his version of the character. And, while the snowman’s ending was sappy, I’ll forgive it given that this is a Christmas comic and that sort of thing is basically mandated!
Still, it’s not much compared to how bored I was reading this one. The first Klaus book is great, as is the first Christmas special, but everything that’s followed since, including The Crying Snowman, is firmly on the naughty list.
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