Christmas With the Super-Heroes
Christmas Eve, 1917. Von Hammer is alone in the sky above the Western Front when the guns go quiet and something happens that the war has no category for. John Byrne's story reaches back to the Enemy Ace's earliest premise, the man apart, the reluctant killer, and frames it in the only light that can make it bearable.
An unexpected and genuinely moving late entry in the Enemy Ace canon. Byrne, writing and drawing, clearly understood the character deeply, and Andy Kubert's inks, the son of the artist who defined von Hammer visually, give the story a generational continuity that feels entirely appropriate for a Christmas tale. The anthology context (alongside Superman, Batman, and other DC heroes in Christmas vignettes) makes von Hammer's isolation all the more pronounced.
