These days Frank Miller is best known for...well, these days he's best known for his terrible film work, being a racist nutball and looking like a hairless vole. Before that, however, Miller was best known for being the creative dynamo who wrote and drew a particularly stark and downbeat run on Daredevil before moving onto dystopian future Batman story The Dark Knight Returns, all of which served as practice before he moved onto his own creator-owned noir-tinged crime series Sin City. Miller is a serious comic creator making serious comics. Or at least, comics which bear all the hallmarks of being serious business, full of tough guy narration boxes, judicious use of shadows and extreme violence. Usually involving a cast of scowling characters. Before all of that, however, he was just your regular work-for-hire artist struggling to make some decent scratch in the comic book biz, and one of his earliest professional works for the Big Two was the DC Super-Star Holiday Special from 1980, where he illustrates a story called Wanted: Santa Claus Dead Or Alive! Which is almost certainly the best name for a Christmas story ever, if not the best name fr a comic book ever. The twist of course is that a bunch of mobsters are using a department store Santa Claus as the key to a robbery, but the story nonetheless features the Caped Crusader throwing a Christmas tree square at a dude's head with the same sort of steely determination Miller's later Goddamn Batman would use. Batman shares the cover of the book with Superman, a witch, and possibly Mary and Joseph on a camel.
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/
