4 out of 5

As I almost always remind: anthologies are tough. Sequencing them, keeping people on theme, curating them, designing them. And I’ll be lovably confusing, given my rating, by offering that I don’t know if Holiday Spirits volume 3 – a third outing of Xmas horror comic book shorts, put together by project manager Jerome Gagnon – is actually a great anthology in terms of its contents. But (with no pun intended) it embodies the spirit of a great anthology, and I also think it’s fun to read, even if there’s not anything specifically here I’m likely to return to.

I’m not going to call out anything specific. This is a very indie production, and the book purposefully embraces quite a range of styles, so being critical of strip X, Y or Z feels somewhat unnecessary; we’re in very subjective territory. The reason I moreso wouldn’t highlight the contents is because, as fun as holiday horror is, it’s also pretty limiting. Unlike Halloween, there’s really not too much we can do with bloody santas and killer elves and etc. That doesn’t prevent some really creative spins and genre mash-ups in the pages, but by the same token, there’s not a strip here that surprises. As mentioned, though, that doesn’t prevent it from being fun to read, still, especially if you have that expectation settled (and tend to like this kind of thing, regardless).

Strips can be funny or mean; they tend not to have happy endings, but not everything ends in bloodshed. We get some Twilight Zone twists, lots of fable riffs, and mostly just taking some creative energy and unleashing it for 4-12 pages.

Which is really why this series wins me over: for all of my waffling and avoidance of calling out any individual, what Gagnon’s oversight has allowed for is the sense that this book was curated. It’s not just an open casting call. Travis Gibb also provides an ongoing frame of a grandmother and grandson exchanging these stories back and forth, with little one page text Cryptkeeper-esque intros inbetween, which allows for even more content as we get spot illustrations and pinups accompanying each of these.

So I’ll amend a previous statement: I can see myself rereading this, quite easily. And there are definitely a good handful of artists I’m curious to follow to other works, which I feel can be one of the main wins of an anthology. The flipside is the actual innards may not be that memorable when taken on their own, but that just means when I do that reread, I’ll be kinda starting fresh, and get the experience again.