DC’s Lobo Was Hired By A Drunken Easter Bunny To Kill SANTA?!

When a character’s Christmas special includes the word paramilitary, someone could take an educated guess and assume it’s Lobo’s. When that story involves a drunken Easter Bunny looking for a mercenary to take out Santa Claus, you can be sure. That sort of lunacy is precisely what fans got in 1992’s Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special, which found the deadliest mercenary in the DC Universe squaring off with a decidedly less than Jolly Old Saint Nick.

Lobo is summoned to a bar, where they find their client, the actual Easter Bunny. And he’s already three sheets to the wind. The slurring rabbit is representing a group of holiday icons who are concerned Santa has overshadowed them and is taking attention away from their special days. Admitting he was never too fond of Christmas anyway, Lobo takes the deal and is on his cosmic motorcycle and headed straight to the North Pole.

But it turns out this isn’t the smiling, Coca-Cola sipping Santa Lobo is dealing with. Instead, this is Kris “Crusher” Kringle, a brutal dictator that rules over his elves with an iron fist. The elves, by the way, are only small due to Kringle’s intentional malnutrition and get just one break a year. Santa has been a frequent target of Amnesty International and only manages to stay in the public’s favor with his once annual good deed. As is to be expected with Lobo, it doesn’t take long for the carnage to begin.

After liquefying the guard elves’ heads with a sniper rifle, Lobo makes his way into the workshop. As alarms blare, one elf has the others take defensive positions, saying “the naughty-est one has come.” An absolute slaughter ensues, with the elves having nothing but pop guns to protect themselves, it doesn’t take long for Lobo to mow through them all, leaving a pile of tiny corpses in his wake. But he makes his way to the bossman’s office, Father Christmas turns out to be no pushover.

The two engage in an absolutely brutal knife fight that is definitely not for the squeamish – or for anyone who doesn’t want to see Santa Claus ultimately decapitated and missing an eyeball. Exploring the rest of the workshop, Lobo finds Santa’s Naughty and Nice lists and sees an opportunity. The nice can be future prey, while the naughty might make for future competition. Lobo converts the workshop into a weapons manufacturing plant, and, after killing Rudolph for refusing to help (yes, really), the Main Man loads up Santa’s sleigh with a stockpile of bombs before taking flight and raining fire from the skies.

So yeah. Anyone looking for It’s a Wonderful Life needs to find a different book. But for those more interested in a blood-soaked, insane, gratuitously violent Christmas story, the Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special is the book to put down on your wish list. As Lobo says in the final panel, offering a middle finger to readers, “Ho Ho Fraggin’ Ho!”

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