The aforementioned Miller crops up repeatedly through the history of lost comic books. Sometimes that's for the better his most recent work, the straight-up racist Holy Terror originally started as an original graphic novel about Batman fighting the Taliban in a post-9/11 America but sometimes, like before he was a total right-wing lunatic, readers missed out on potential gold. In collaboration with subversive writer and Howard The Duck creator Steve Gerber, he was in line to reboot the entire line of DC's greatest characters. Rumour had it Gerber was going to pre-empt Superman's revamp in John Byrne's Man of Steel with DC Comics Presents #97, which involved dead Kryptonians raining down on Metropolis. That was pretty dark. In fact Gerber and Miller's proposal had been sorted a few years prior, and would've taken in reboots of DC's Trinity of superheroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, under an initiative called Metropolis. Each book would've boiled the character down to a single, iconic phrase Man Of Steel, Dark Knight and Amazon, respectively with Gerber writing Wonder Woman, Miller Batman, and the two of them teaming on Superman. It turned that, following the continuity reset of Crisis On Infinite Earths, DC were considering multiple pitches for reboots, and Gerber doesn't like competition. He withdrew his proposal and Miller went with him, reworking his pitch into the classic Dark Knight Returns.
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/
