I didn't find but one concrescent Christmas-myth this year. (Grant Morrison, the last two issues of your KLAUS project let me down.) For several years, I had been familiar with the comical character of Jingle Belle, impish daughter of Santa Claus, but I hadn't read her earliest appearances from Oni Press. The two-part story I feature here, whose second part sported the title I'm using for both, was only the second time Paul Dini's character had appeared in a story, though an artist named Lynne Naylor is credited on Wikipedia for having made early concept drawings. Stephen DeStefano penciled the first story as well as this second outing.
One interesting aspect of this tale is that it draws upon a motif I've identified once or twice before: the trope of Santa Claus being "the master of the frozen North." In the backstory to the main heroine's birth, a frost-creature, the Blizzard Wizard, controls the North Pole and uses his icy foot-soldiers (made of rancid ice-cream) to enslave the Northern elves. When the elves' queen Mirabelle seeks to free her people, the evil Wizard threatens to imprison her.
Enter Kris Kringle, which here is another name Dini uses for Santa, and one I'll use here just for variety's sake. Kris has mastered many of the animals of the arctic or has at least made common cause with them against the Wizard's tyranny, and with their help he invades the frosty fiend's sanctuary and defeats him. The liberated elves swear fealty to Kris by vowing to help him make toys for children, while Queen Mirabelle marries the hulking old fellow.
A century or so later, the only offspring of Kris and Mirabelle has reached her teenaged years, and she's a daddy's girl in reverse, alternately seeking to impress him and to put him down. In the story's first part, Jingle (whose technical full name would be Jingle Kringle) makes a combat-toy to impress her sire, but she fills it with live ammunition-- suggesting at very least a lack of ability to think critically. Then, knowing that Kris is supposed to make an appearance at a department store, she reroutes him to a Hanukah celebration and tries to fill in for him-- though again, in a half-hearted, distracted-teenager manner. However, before she reaches her goal, the Blizzard Wizard makes his move. He creates an ice-storm to sidetrack Jingle, feeding her a line that the bad weather proves that Santa's weather-subduing snow-globe must be malfunctioning. The villain rather easily talks Jingle into bringing him the globe, and while she's on her little jaunt, he uses the device to initiate his re-conquest of the North Pole.
Dini doesn't mean for the reader to think that Jingle is dumb, even though she does dumb things. Rather, a flashback at the start of issue #2 establishes that as a small child (presumably only a few decades old) she has considerable ambivalence about sharing her father with thousands of other children, so she always remains similarly ambivalent about Kris Kringle's mission in life-- meaning that she screws things up because she secretly wants her father to devote all of his attention to her. Conversely, when Kris and Mirabelle discuss their wild child, they conclude that they were too indulgent with her when she was young, so that now, when they attempt to instill discipline in Jingle, she merely resents it and keeps yearning for the happy days when she alone was the center of her parents' world.
And that ends the psychological myth, which I imagine Dini will never alter because it's the source of his comical conflict. But after her father and mother are captured by the Wizard, Jingle gets the chance to emulate her father's feat of defeating the tyrant. This means enlisting the arctic animals as Kris did, although, since Jingle is not as powerful, she ends using more scatterbrained methods...
Like dueling with the mammoth king of the narwhals, and winning the duel only because she comes up with the improbable strategy of plugging up the creature's blowhole...
And sending an incompetent assistant to enlist the polar bears, only to gripe when the elf comes back with a bevy of lemmings-- which manage to save the day anyway (not unlike Jingle herself).
The Wizard is defeated, but not surprisingly, she's still in the doghouse for her carelessness. So her "imitatio Santa" fails, but it's questionable as to whether she really wanted to make herself over into her father's image. Indeed, in all the subsequent JINGLE BELLE stories I've read, she just keeps rebelling against Kris's authority in one way or another-- which seems to be the perfect way to keep drawing his attention away from all those other kids. I don't think Dini had any desire to "solve" Jingle's psychological problems, since she's not meant to mature any more than Dennis the Menace. But "Hellion" is one of the few times Dini brought her psychological quirks into line with a metaphysical myth about Santa of the North Pole.
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