Today in Comics (Alternate) History, Thanksgiving Day, 1990: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Aquaman.

Hey, remember thirty years ago, when the world ended? That thirty years has flown by so fast it feels like the world ended only last week. Anyway, flash-forward four years to a post-apocalypse world of Thanksgiving Day, 1990! When I check the "Today in Regular History" website, it tells me that the strange, mutated people of Thanksgiving 1990 had made "Love Takes Time" by Mariah Carey the #1 hit! Well, you've always got to expect some radioactive horror after the bombs fall.


from "Thanksgiving Day — 1990!" in Strange Adventures #132 (DC, September 1961), script by John Broome, pencils and inks by Murphy Anderson, letters by Gaspar Saladino
Wow, that sure is a lot more exciting than my Thanksgiving day, which mainly consists of stuffing myself with stuffing (of the non-stuffed bull variety) and then lying on the couch for the rest of the day burping along to the songs in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. But in the scary atomic world of the future past, just gathering enough food to even survive is a challenge! Why, even Saturn Girl and G.I. Joe's Duke only got seed, sods, fruits and grasses! Say...is corn grass?


Later, the last dregs of humanity have a Thanksgiving picnic! It's all vegetarian (booooo!), because if you remember your basic Atomic Knights mythology, all the animals were mutated into monstrous forms. So not so much any turkey steaming on the table, more like turkeys looming on the horizon ready to stomp your house while gobbling menacingly.


Suddenly, distant relatives you don't care for that much arrive for Thanksgiving dinner! In this case, the interlopers are the armies of Atlantis, and they're brandishing their "8"s at us! Quick, put in the extending leaf and get out the card table for the kids!


So just where did this horde of the Undersea Kingdom come from? If you can trust the ads on the very next page of this here comic book, they came from Rockville Center, New York, and they're monochromatically armed for battle at a low, low price!


No, actually, the Atlantean attackers were blasted from the distant past into their hellish post-nuclear future by the power of the atomic bomb! Golly, is there anything it can't do?!?


SCIENCE!:


Luckily, the Atomic Knights fight right back! Keep in mind these tactics for when your cousins from a mythical land of millennia ago show up and there's not enough green bean casserole!


So, just like many Thanksgiving stories before it, the Atomic Knights' 1990 Thanksgiving ends with exterminating the native people. Enjoy your pumpkin pie, suckers!