What I’ve Watched, Read, Done – December 2025 – Blue Towel Productions

And just like that, 2025 is over. If you had any goals for the year that you haven’t pulled off yet (like perfecting your yuletide-themed latte art), well, you blew it.

But oh well, not to worry, you’re in good company and there’s a whole ‘nother year to work on.

I had a pretty big December. It started off in Mexico, of all places, where we were seeing my daughter graduate from a missions-training program that she was doing, and then from there returning to New York (where we’d been vacationing for most of November) so she could have a week with her grandmother, including a late Thanksgiving.

It was a bit of a family affair as in addition to my mom, we were joined by two of her sisters, one of their husbands, two of my cousins, and one of the cousin’s wives. Plus me, my wife, and two of my daughters. My mom doesn’t cook like she used to so most of the Thanksgiving work fell to my wife. She did a great job, which is especially notable as the traditional Thanksgiving meal is not really such a thing in Australia, where we live and where she grew up.

Anyway, then it was back to Australia and into getting ready for Christmas!

Actually, the first step in getting ready for Christmas was dealing with some plumbing problems in our back yard.

That was exciting. But it’s behind us now. At least, it is for now. We’ll see what the future brings.

Because of the tightness of the time, I didn’t get to dwell on this blog as much about all the different ways we celebrated, including our decorations and the now-traditional return of the Martian Kings.

You can read about these fellows here, and re-experience the “Christmas special” I once did with them here.

Notably, the Martian King numbers actually increased this year, thanks to the generosity of a cousin that we visited in the Netherlands in October.

Actually, the new members of the population don’t have crowns, so we’ve dubbed them “Martian Squires” (they look after the Martian steeds) and some future Christmas, when I have more time in the lead-up, I hope I can do more with them.

Anyway, even with all the busyness, Christmas was good, and included some old favorites…

I haven’t watched either of these in a number of years, and I’m glad to report they both still hold up.

I also unlocked the minor achievement of finally watching the legacy sequel to one of my favourites, A Christmas Story.

(Various minor spoilers from here on in)

A Christmas Story Christmas

In this movie we find Ralphie (Peter Billingsley), now grown up, married with children, and pursuing his dream of being a novelist. As his family prepares to celebrate Christmas with his parents, he is hit with the devastating news that his dad, “the Old Man” of the first film (memorably played by Darrin McGavin) has died. Ralph then takes it upon himself to provide his family with the best Christmas experience he possibly can, so that their memories of the holiday won’t be forever sad.

It’s a sweet movie, though not a particularly memorable one. There are some nice bits and a few genuinely surprising moments (like when Ralph accidentally beans his daughter with a snowball), but aside from that it’s not terribly funny, and the fanciful daydreams that Ralphie has land a bit better when they’re coming for a kid rather than an adult. And it’s not remotely difficult to guess how the storyline of Ralph wanting to be a published writer is going to work out–it’s a story beat lifted straight out of Little Women, although lacking in the dramatic power.

Still I’m glad I watched it. Like I said, it’s cute–just not something I’m likely to want to revisit like I do the original.

In addition to Billingsley, the cast includes returning plays like Scott Schwartz (Flick), R.D. Robb (Schwartz), Zack Ward (former bully Scut Farkus, now a police officer) and Ian Petrella as Ralphie’s brother Randy. Erinn Hayes does a nice job as Ralphie’s wife Sandy. Darrin McGavin is heavily presented in archival audio and photos, and Melinda Dillon was asked to reprise her role as Ralphie’s mom, but declined. She was in poor health and died not long after the film debuted in 2022), and her part here is recast with Julie Hagerty.

Given that my December was spent mostly on holiday (even after we got back to Perth), I found myself reading a lot more than I have typically done. I mostly tended to gravitate mostly to comics and mysteries. And when it comes to this actual month, I guess when I say “mostly” I mean “exclusively”.

Archie volume two

Starting in the comic world, there was this Archie volume by Mark Waid and drawn by Veronica Fish. It was the second in a rebooted version of the classic Archie storyline, featuring a whole new design aesthetic and a modernised storytelling style, albeit still without the grim ‘n’ gritty material that we got in Riverdale around the same time.

This is really a delightful book. Waid is an excellent comic book storyteller, who generally knows how to bring together plot, character and tone so they all work together seamlessly. I already had volume 1, but it’s been a while since I read it, so this book reminded me how much I like this take on the characters. It really does give the feeling of something fresh and reinvented, but still classic. I enjoyed it enough that I’ve spent some recent comic book money on volumes three & four of the same series, and am now waiting for their arrival.

Batman Superman World’s Finest – Return to Kingdom Come

This is another series by Mark Waid, this drawn by Dan Mora, which features a timeless version of Superman and Batman in their early days (ie. Dick Grayson is Robin). It’s a series I’ve been only reading in collected editions (generally buying them every time I go back to the States). Some of it can be a bit clunky or overstuffed, but it’s always reliable to provide classic-style superhero comic book fun, without requiring its readers to be well-versed in what is going on in the company’s shared universe at the same time. Thus, it’s kind of perfect for me.

That said, this volume, as the title promises, ends up tying into Waid and Alex Ross’ classic Kingdom Come, basically serving as a bit of a prequel to it by tying the origin of Magog (a major character from Kingdom Come) into something from this series. But I still enjoyed it, even though I don’t need those sorts of connections in my comics to make me happy.

Legion of Three Worlds

I’m a huge Legion of Super-Heroes fan and back when this giant book came out, it was a big deal. In its pages, three different Legion continuities all came together in a massive crossover against Geoff Johns’ villain of choice back then, Superboy Prime (a version of Superboy that went really bratty, entitled and murderous). For me and for other fans back in 2008, I was super-excited. The “original” Legion had been making new appearances at the time (notably in a story collected as Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes) and we hadn’t yet really had a chance to see what was going on with this new-old version of the characters. Meanwhile, the “Threeboot” version of the Legion, which had been created by Mark Waid but was by this point in other hands, was winding down, and the “Postboot” version (the one I’d most like to see ongoing adventures of) had been in limbo (both figuratively and literally) for several years. So this was a chance to see all of this.

So it was exciting to read back in its day, even if at the same I could tell that it wasn’t really the book I actually wanted. For one thing, the Legion is already a vast sprawling world at the best of times. Combining three different versions of the characters only tripled that challenge. And yet with all that in mind, writer Geoff Johns still chose to spend a lot of time on characters whose connections to the Legion was spurious at best: Bart Allen and Conner Kent (both of whom the series brought back to life) and of course Superboy Prime. All three of those characters have a lot more to do with each other than the Legion, so it felt like Johns was really telling a totally different story that just used the Legion as a backdrop. Add to that the somewhat abrupt and gruesome deaths (a classic Johns trope) of characters like Threeboot Sun Boy, Threeboot Element Lad, Kinetic, Rond Vidar and R.J. Brande, and the whole thing has a bit of an unpleasant taste.

Still, there were some good Legion moments snuck in there (if anyone knows how to handle a giant cast of characters, it’s Geoff Johns from that era) and the whole thing is illustrated by George Perez, so you know it’s going look amazing.

Incidentally, though this thing has “Final Crisis” in the title, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual Final Crisis series. It just came out around the same time and I think used the title as part of the marketing.

Justice League of America: The Wedding of the Atom and Jean Palmer

This is a bit of an odd collection. I was very roughly familiar with the ongoing story of the Atom’s attempts to save and then wed Jean Palmer, thanks to my childhood experience with Super-Team Family #13 (read about it here), so I assumed this collection would primarily focus on that. And as it happens, it does include a chunk of that, reprinting as it does Super-Team Family #11-14 by writer Gerry Conway, which basically covered the story of Jean being possessed by some great cosmic force that made her a psychic danger to whatever world she visited. But that story is wrapped up at the end of those four issues.

That story crossover with, to some degree, a few issues of The Secret Society of Super-Villains, but those issues are not included in this collection. What is included is a year’s worth of Justice League of America stories, some of which loosely connect, with things like the Atom’s bachelor party, and then culminate with the actual wedding at the end. So any expectations that the whole book would be about the Atom and his engagement turn out to be misguided, even though it seems like they easily could have included the Secret Society issues and at least dropped some of the early Justice League stuff, which isn’t even written by Gerry Conway (he takes over the JLA writing after a while, and only then do those stories address the engagement at all).

Still, it’s a fun peak into Bronze-Age JLA which I probably would not have had the chance to read otherwise, so once I was free of my false expectations, it was a lot of fun. It’s pushing toward “my” era of the Justice League (which really started with latter part of Gerry Conway’s run, while this book shows you how that began).

Moving from comics to the regular, prose-filled printed page, we start with the third of three Japanese mysteries which I have read recently (you can read about the other two in the November post).

The Man Who Died Seven Times

This novel, by Yasuhiko Nishizawa, is about a young man, Hisataro, who suffers from a bizarre and somewhat random condition whereby he will periodically relive (ie in a time loop) the same 24 hour period eight extra times. One of these occasions happens to be during a regular New Year’s gathering of his particularly dysfunctional family at his wealthy grandfather’s house. When, on the first repeat, he discovers his grandfather has been murdered, Hisataro has to figure who is responsible and what has changed to allow this event to take place, when it didn’t on his first time through.

This book features some pretty nutty concepts but is quite simple to read (the English translation is by Jesse Kirkwood). It’s a pretty decent mystery that does hold up to scrutiny, but ends up being less of a “Whodunnit?” than a “What is actually going on?” As a result, the payoff is a bit different than I expected, and possibly not quite as satisfying.

Magpie Murders

This is a novel by Anthony Horowitz, the creator of both Foyle’s War and Alex Rider. It’s about book editor Susan Ryeland who at the start receives the latest manuscript from a successful mystery author that she works with. We proceed to read the entire book until almost the end, when it turns out that the last chapter is missing from Susan’s copy. Then she finds out that the writer, Alan Conway, has himself been murdered!

The gimmick of this book (which has spawned its own TV adaptation and at least one sequel) is that it is really two mysteries in one. One is the death of Conway, and the other is the murder that is contained in the book-inside-the-book, the one that is missing the last chapter. Of course, the missing chapter turns out to have everything to do with Conway’s death, and the two solutions neatly come together at the end. Both mysteries are pretty satisfying, and having them revealed in parallel makes for an effective sort of gimmick.

I watched the television adaption of the sequel book, Moonflower Murders, on my flight home recently. Of course, now I’m not really interested in reading that book, nor in watching the adaptation of this first one. Apparently, a third and final book in the series is forthcoming–only time will tell whether I consume the story via reading or watching!

The Word is Murder

This is another novel by Anthony Horowitz. In this one, Horowitz himself is a character–the narrator, actually. The idea is that the writer Anthony Horowitz has been approached by a former police officer, the gruff but brilliant Daniel Hawthorne, to write a book about his latest case–essentially becoming the Watson to his Holmes. That case involves the murder of a woman just a short time after she has planned and organised her own funeral.

It’s a fun idea for a series and an intriguing set-up for a case. Because Horowitz himself is a character, there are various references to his work on Foyle’s War and other projects, and one amusing scene features a meeting that he’s having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson about a prospective sequel to the Tintin movie.

The resolution of the mystery is satisfying and, in retrospect, quite obvious, but that’s how it often is with good mysteries. You don’t know what’s going on while it’s unfolding, but after the answers are given it makes sense.

There are several other books in this series and I don’t expect it get the television or streaming treatment anytime soon, so maybe I’ll give them a go sometime soon.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hope your December (with all the various festivities) was a good one, and that your 2026 is looking even better.