The Scottish comic-book legendary writer, Grant Morrison has finally unveiled his upcoming project with Boom Studios’, something that had been arousing curiosity since last year. Along with artist Dan Mora, Morrison would be penning an all-new reinvented Santa Claus in the six-issue miniseries, Klaus.
With the San Diego Comic Con round the corner, the American comic-book and graphic novel publisher Boom Studios’ and Morrison have shared their thoughts on Klaus in an exclusive interview with comicbookresources.com.
Explaining his latest creation, Morrison revealed that Klaus will be a series built on the early Siberian and Viking mythology rounding the origin arc of our favorite Christmas Man, popularly known as Santa Claus. However Morrison who got the notion for Klaus way back during his days of doing ‘All-Star Superman’ for DC Comics excitedly shared that Klaus will bring Santa into a different perspective, something cooler and fiercer on the lines of ‘Conan The Barbarian’ as a young man with black hair and black beard.
Sharing his insight more on the ideating stage of Klaus, Morrison stated that, “We’ve never seen him (Santa Claus) young. We’ve never seen how did he get to be Santa Claus? There’s so much you can do with this character. Everyone’s familiar with it, but no one really knows him. It was all about just getting to the roots of this thing. Here’s a massive icon everyone around the world knows….We go back to the shamanic roots of the character, and the mythological roots of the character. It’s a man suddenly finding himself in a much bigger, stranger world.”
In his attempt to brandish Father Christmas as a superhero in a fantasy epic for a wider audience, Morrison would be delving deeper into the origin of Santa Claus and the mini-series would focus on his early days of adventure and how he gets the red sack, or the reindeers or how he builds himself his iconic sleigh.
The first look at Santa from Klaus reveals the incredible artwork from Dan Mora who is famous for his work on ‘Hexed’. The young Siberian-styled Santa hauls a dead-bloody reindeer over his shoulders with his pet wolf (with symbolically the red nose) in a snow-clad terrain. It would be interesting to see how Morrison’s twisted tale of Santa Claus movies from his pet wolf to his mystical and mythological allies including reindeers, elves and other characters associated with our Father Christmas from magic lore.
The mini-series kick-starts this November and Morrison has also hinted that he would love to extend Klaus into his own Batmanish kind of franchise. So Santa from Boon Studios’ might have a long way to jingle with us! Ho! Ho! Ho!
