COMICS: A Yuletide Flame by Hayden Fryer
COMICS: A Yuletide Flame by Hayden Fryer
An Australian written Xmas tale in which a long lost love visits for Xmas Eve in the form of a Ghost.
A Ghostly Night Before Christmas in ‘A Yuletide Flame’
I’m the first one to throw down my gauntlet on the table of intense disdain towards comic book Christmas stories. Unfortunately, with everything that can be done that bears a semblance of originality to the spirit of Christmas - has been done. And I’ve had my fill of killer snowman stories or super powered elves or ghosts of Christmas whatever. Hatred towards comic book Christmas tales aside, the limitation that writing about our favourite time of year places on a writer means there’s a limitation placed on the type of story we can hope to enjoy as readers. Still, somehow A Yuletide Flame has managed to buck that trend in providing a tale that is serene, eerie and hopelessly romantic in a supernaturally undead kind-of way.
Writer and artist Hayden Fryer takes us back into our own childhoods where the very idea of a ghost Christmas story can be as exciting as it is terrifying. In a landscape filled with a snowy backdrop, a perfect night before Christmas dinner and a roasting fireplace, we’re given a tale that feels as old as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with the moral conundrums replaced by a decades long romance allowed to flourish in this cartoonist’s gothic sonnet of lovers refusing to be separated. Because who says “til death do us part” has to be the end?!
A Black and white drawn outing seems appropriate given the age of the two characters: the protagonist, an old woman and an old man, who seems to be her dead husband that turns up as a ghostly spirit of Rose Red likeness. Eager to please her guest, the old woman answers the door and his form has changed into her husband who looks alive and well. Throughout the evening, the two of them relive their entire lives all over again. Aging backwards to where they first met only to have the clock turn back again and the husband to turn into the gaunt, ghostlike apparition before leaving the house and disappearing into the night.
The antagonist on the other hand is time itself. Knowing the two lovers only have a finite amount of hours to be in each others company before the end of the night before Christmas rolls around makes this gothic romance ethereally surreal. A Yuletide Flame begins with the return of the husband just as the lighting of a candle and in turn ends with the husband leaving and heading back to the supernatural beyond just as the fireplace dies out. It’s a symmetry that creates an air of completeness. A complexity that feels ever so simple and demonstrates Fryer’s maturity as a storyteller. He could’ve taken the route of penning an A-typical ghost story with shrieks and hauntings but by tackling the romance genre head-on we’re given a comic book that feels more like a fable than it does the former.
This brand new Christmas fable shows what the comic book medium can and will be when the creator spins the web of the fates correctly: a story that elevates the medium. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate comic book Christmas stories. They can all get in the fucking bin. But this isn’t a Christmas story, this is a gothic horror ghost romance which just so happens to be set the night before Christmas.
Don’t agree? Read it again.
