Hey, so you know Conan The Barbarian, the classic Robert E Howard creation of high fantasy who lives in a primordial Earth where he kills sabretooth tigers and has sex with everything (or at least that's what happened in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film)? Imagine if he was Santa Claus. Wouldn't that be a riot? Yes it would be, stoned fifteen-year old who's just noticed that his Christmas hat has fallen on his collection of seventies Marvel comics, yes it would be. To you and nobody else. And yet against all odds, in 1996, the first and only issue of Santa The Barbarian was published. To very little fanfare. That's despite it being created by Rob Liefeld, who at the time was at the peak of his popularity, having coasted off an inexplicably successful career drawing comics for Marvel into co-founding Image Comics as an avenue for printing his creator-owned superheroes. Almost all of which were just knock-offs of the Marvel characters he'd previously worked on, only with goofy punning names and even tinier ankles. Santa The Barbarian, meanwhile, was a rip off of a character Marvel hadn't had the rights to in years, and whom Liefeld had never worked on! The story and art were actually handled by Dan Fraga, which means he's really the man responsible for topless beefcake Santa wielding an axe, cutting people's heads off and ending the first issue of his hot new series by stabbing multiple people with a huge blade and grinning like a psycho, Happy Christmas to all...AND TO ALL A BIG KNIFE!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
