Mix Thoroughly to Combine

Truth be told, most of these big sprawling crossovers have either bored me, confused me or made me very angry. That, and it costs a lot of money to try to keep up. So, I usually ignore them — or only pick up a few of the titles that interest me.

But, then there was the Amalgam line of comics: DC and Marvel collaborated to create a universe which fused all of their characters. (The larger DC vs Marvel story didn't interest me at all; the Amalgam line did.) Bruce Wayne and Batgirl were agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Logan was Dark Claw, defender of Gotham. Storm had been raised by the Amazons. And so on. It was actually really cool. Too bad the Amalgam line wasn't continued beyond a couple of miniseries. :(

My favorite crossovers:

-- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Dude, it's the ultimate crossover! Captain Nemo! The Invisible Man! Doctor Jekyll! All fighting H.G. Wells's Martians and crap! Every named character in the series, down to the most minor, hails from a different literary universe. With Alan Moore writing and the fantastic Kevin O'Neill on the art, it may be the classiest crossover in comics history, but that doesn't make it any less gloriously geeky.

-- The ongoing mock rivalry between Darby Conley and Stephan Pastis in Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine.

-- I have an ongoing fascination with Osamu Tezuka's "star system" characters, the recurring characters who appear in different roles in many of his manga. For example, Shunsaku Ban, a portly man with a moustache who usually "plays" detectives, appears in at least nine different manga, including two separate roles in Astro Boy. The most jarring instance, for me, is seeing the recurring villain Acetylene Lamp as a broadly-drawn cartoon heavy in early Tezuka manga like Lost World, then as the serious Nazi antagonist Herr Lampe, drawn in a much more realistic style, in Adolf. The "star system" cameos give Tezuka's manga a unique sense of continuity and familiarity; much as you might expect to see Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton movie or Toshiro Mifune in a Kurosawa film, the presence of Rock or Sapphire reminds you that you're in Tezuka's world.

-- CLAMP's Tsubasa is all crossover; it's Crisis on Infinite CLAMPs, revisiting characters from the prolific team's many manga. But my favorite crossover moment comes early in the series, when the characters send an apple through their Mokona, a creature that can teleport material through dimensions. Over in xxxHOLiC, CLAMP's other currently-running manga, the matching Mokona spits up the apple. It's the kind of giddily goofy stunt that I love, and it's hard not to imagine the CLAMP members giggling as they plotted out the synchronicity. Why can't plodding crossovers like "Civil War" have fun stuff like that?

-- "Convoy," my pitch for a Marvel miniseries in which all the boss vehicles in the Marvel Universe team up. Razorback's semi and U.S. 1 meet Captain America's van, the Punisher's battle van, and Team America's motorcycles, then drive cross-country to take on the Big Wheel. A tense conflict follows the appearance of the Spider-Mobile ... the BLACK Spider-Mobile! If Marvel accepts my pitch, we are destined for SO many Eisners.

Hmmm ... crossovers. So often so full of potential for great storytelling, so often executed in such way as to give new meaning to the phrase, "Well, that sucked!"

I've got two ties. Honorable mentions go to the recent Captain Atom mini series, which did a good job of both tying into the universe crunching of Infinite Crisis and setting in motion the reboot of the WildStorm Universe. Yeah, the last vestiges of anything interesting about the WSU was wiped away by it, but the scale of the flaming collapse was fun to watch. I loved seeing Jack Hawksmoor get bit in the ass by his own arrogance. But the story felt a bit rushed and incoherent in places.

Rushed incoherency also explains why the Coup d'Etat crossover that spanned WildStorm's Eye of the Storm line of books didn't quite work for me. It was awesome watching the storylines from Wildcats 3.0, Sleeper, and StormWatch: Team Achilles come together in one glorious moment of three organizations playing games heads and shoulders above the Authority's ability to cope with them ... and then there was the Authority chapter of the series that ... was so lacking in what made the other books so fun and exciting it was a complete let down. Coup d'Etat was the swan-song of the ETOS books, too. ~sigh~

The tie for first place goes to the cracked-out idea to have Mr. Majestic take a little vacation into the DCU. The scenes of him rather autocratically interacting with the rest of the JLA, telling Lois Lane that she smelled ... funny, and eventually bonding with Superman not only did a great job of contrasting the WSU with the DCU, but they were fun and the whole exercise was a wonderful mix of using both characterization and plot to drive a story.

The other tie is the very first Batman-Grendel crossover. Hunter Rose playing headgames with Batman and all because ... he wants to play what's more or less a practical joke? And the multiple layers of head-fuckery that Hunter Rose engages in to perpetrate it? Dear God. (Someday I'm afraid that Matt Wagner's going to find out the sheer love I have for his brain just for that scene in the Gotham Club where Hunter Rose is sitting next to Bruce Wayne and is all, "I seem to have" slurp "gotten your ginger ale" slurp "and you've got my champagne.") And I like how it all ended with no clear victor. Batman breaks Grendel's arm, but he doesn't catch on to Grendel's plan, not until it's too late, and Grendel nurses his broken arm and realizes that yeah, he pulled an end run on Batman ... this time. Which is how it should be, because really, this is a story of each man taking on his mirror, his dark twin, and it was a glorious mix of character and plotting and ... it's as gripping to me each time I re-read it.

My copies of this story are falling apart. It can't come back into print soon enough.

I really haven't liked many of the current crossovers where the essential idea seems not to tell a good story but to CHANGE THE UNIVERSE FOREVER! And kill some B-list characters, of course.

But one crossover did bring me back to comics about six years ago. At one time, Chuck Dixon wrote several of the satellite Batman titles at DC and he created a story line called "Hunt For Oracle" that ran through both Nightwing and Birds of Prey and also co-starred Tim Drake's Robin.

A crimelord who Nightwing was trying to take down discovered the existence of Oracle (Barbara Gordon) and hired people to find out who she was and take her down. The crossover ended wonderfully, with the first physical meeting of Oracle and Black Canary in Birds of Prey and really showed off the strengths of each character.

And I can't resist mentioning JLA/Avengers from a few years back. Because that was just superhero fun at its best.

The only mega-crossover I had some experience of is the Secret Wars. Secret Wars is basically about a character called the Beyonder, who teleports a number of superheroes and supervillains to a planet called Battleworld where (guess!) the characters do battle with each other using alien weapons and technology. The main things that came out of this series is the original of Spider-Man's black costume and the decision by the Thing to remain on Battleworld, as he can be human there.

I don't remember a great deal about the series, which ran 12 issues, but I remember enjoying it for Spider-Man, which is the main reason I was interested in the series. It was a fairly entertaining limited run, but it had very little impact on other comics, character- or story-wise. And the main purpose of it was simply to sell toys, not exactly the most noble of things to base a comic on.

I like and dislike any of the X-verse or Marvel crossovers. I like them when I get to see characters I like and don't usually see together interact. I dislike them because a) there's that many more titles you suddenly have to buy to keep up, and b) I'm totally uninterested in many of the characters (I didn't buy their titles before for a reason!). I loved Joe Mad's art in "Age of Apocalypse" but didn't care at all for the story. I got annoyed by the Fantastic Four and the Avengers taking up screentimes in the X-books during "Onslaught". I suppose if there was any X Universe-wide crossover I enjoyed, it would be "X-Cutioner's Song", when Strife introduced the Legacy Virus. But I could have done with less Cable there; never cared for him.

I adored the crossover of Deadpool and Spider-Man, when 'Pool and Blind Al got sent back in time, and everyone thought 'Pool was Peter Parker and Al was Aunt May. And I've enjoyed any time 'Pool showed up in an X-book, as well as any time one of the X-Men has shown up in his books.

There is an issue of Moon Knight I liked, that featured Gambit and Werewolf. I have the Marvel Team-Up that featured Spidey, Gambit, and — wait for it — Howard the Duck! Hell, I like Gumbo teamed up with pretty much anyone. One of my fave issues of Wolverine had the furry Canadian teamed up with Gumbo and Jubilee in Japan!

There was an interesting Spidey/X-Men crossover, Mutant Agenda, which was not only a crossover of characters, but media — the story was told both in comic books and in the Spider-Man newspaper comic strip! Of course, I had to be very careful to get all the strips clipped out ....

If I remember correctly, the big "New Universe" crossover handled it a little differently — instead of a lot of title-hopping, each book simply reflected that set of characters' reactions to the creation of The Pitt (Pittsburgh got blown up real good). But it's been a long time, so I could be wrong there.

What I've gotten to see of the various big DC/Marvel crossovers has been interesting, particularly the ones with Spidey and Bats. But the subsequent Amalgam universe, with Dark Claw (Wolverine and Batman crossed together) was even better than any of those!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did some enjoyable crossovers with Ceberus, Usagi Yojimbo and Flaming Carrot.

A little-known comic crossover I enjoyed involved the universes of ElfQuest and Xanth, in the graphic novels Return to Centaur and Morning Becalms Electra, which were based on the novel Isle of View, by Piers Anthony. Well, okay, I never actually got the second book, and I've heard conflicting info as to whether it was ever actually released. Even so, I read the original novel and loved it, and did enjoy the half of the comic adaptaton that I managed to get. In the story, Che Centaur gets tangled up in a goblin war and meets a lost elf maid from the World of Two Moons. A Wolfrider, to be specific. The character, Jenni, was based on a real-life girl who was paralysed when struck by a drunk driver. So not only was the book a crossover of two of my fave franchises, but it was done for a sweet reason! And hey, I liked the art in Return to Centaur.

Another comic crossover that I thought was great fun was the one between Star Trek and X-Men, "Star TreX", written by Scott Lobdell and illustrated by a number of artists, including Marc Silvestri. It featured a number of the more popular X-Men and Kirk's crew, fighting together against two megalomaniancs from each of their dimensions. The best part, of course, is when Beast and Bones are having a discussion, and someone calls out "Dr. McCoy!"; they both snap "What?" Then they did a sequel, "Second Contact", that teamed the X-Men up with Picard's crew. Even more interesting, the issue continued in novel form rather than comic, in Michael Jan Friendman's Planet X!

And speaking of Star Trek crossovers, I have a fun parody comic from years back. It's Imagi-Mation Magazine Presents #2, "Dr. Whom Meets Star Wreck". It features parodies of the Kirk and Picard crews, as well as Baker's Doctor, Leela, and K-9. Oddly enough, the art is done by a Michael Friedman! (No, not the same bloke as Michael Jan Friedman, in case that wasn't clear.) The story itself was a collaboration between this Friedman and Brian Laine. The computer-coloured art is choppy and pixelated by today's standards, but it's a fun book — if you happen to stumble across it in a bargain bin somewhere, snag it! ('Cause you can't have mine!)

I was never a big fan of sprawling "event"-type crossovers, even back in the not-so-distant "good old days" when the worst thing about them tended to be their overabundance of overcrowded fight scenes and their near absence of the characterization and non-violent character interaction that I prefer. Or, in the case of inter-Bat-book crossovers like "Bruce Wayne, Fugitive" and "No Man's Land" (which in retrospect seems like some kind of bizarre foreshadowing of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco), their tendency to gratuitously trash and/or totally destroy anyone and anything (including Gotham City itself) connected with Bruce Wayne/Batman, usually in a rather contrived and insufficiently dramatically justified way.

More recently, of course, no multi-book "event" crossover seems to be deemed complete by DC or Marvel without one or more of the following: a) the implausibly arbitrary or traumatically torturous death of at least one perfectly good character, usually female (Teen Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day; JLA: Identity Crisis; Batman: War Games); b) one or more longtime heroes either going insane and murderously attacking their fellow good guys (Avengers Disassembled) or being revealed to have taken various unsavory actions in the past out of a desperation-fuelled "end justifies the means" philosophy (Identity Crisis again); or c) some sort of major dystopian readjustment of the company-universe status quo (Marvel's Civil War) or warping of reality itself (DC's Infinite Crisis and Marvel's House of M).

A number of these crossovers did have interesting moments, mostly in the more self-contained associated miniseries such as Mark Waid's House of M: Spider-Man; David Hine's Mutopia (the House of M version of the unfortunately cancelled peripheral X-title District X); and Gail Simone's Infinite Crisis tie-in series Villains United, which struck me as one of the few worthwhile features of the entire overblown event. But the long drawn out parent crossovers have been increasingly marred by distractingly frequent continuity glitches regarding such basic facts as what happened when and how (these became virtually incessant toward the end of Civil War) and the mindbogglingly out of character behavior required of even major characters in order to make the plot come out the way the management wants it to. (Why would it not occur to Captain America that violently opposing the Superhuman Registration Act could lead to civilian casualties until the very moment his side was on the brink of victory? Why would characters like Ms. Marvel and Wonder Man go along with every increasingly questionable measure mandated by Iron Man's pro-registration leadership, including deputizing homicidally psychotic supervillains to hunt down dissident heroes whose sole crime was refusing to register? Why would the normally emotionally impervious Reed Richards suddenly become so terrified of being blacklisted like his hitherto unheard of uncle that he would continue to collaborate with Tony Stark on draconian measures like a supermax prison in the Negative Zone where otherwise innocent non-registrants could potentially be incarcerated for life long after it had apparently cost him both his marriage and his self-respect?) Overall, the recent high-profile months-long company-wide "events" have done so much literal and metaphorical violence to their respective universes, with such unsatisfactory results, that if I had the Scarlet Witch's powers, I'd be tempted to say "No more Big Summer Crossovers — even if they don't drag on for nearly the entire next year!"

That said, I have enjoyed a few more modest, low-key crossovers that didn't have gut-wrenching body counts and weren't endlessly hyped as events that would "change the [fill in the blank] universe forever!" One of these was the 2000 "The Reign of Emperor Joker" (DC), by Joe Kelly and various other Superman scripters, in which the Clown Prince of Crime conned the mischievous Fifth Dimension magic-user Mr. Mxyzptlk into lending him his powers. He then used these reality-altering abilities to crown himself emperor of all he surveyed and magically turn the DC universe upside down, more or less literally. For instance, Bizarro became the world's greatest hero while Superman was a fugitive from justice and the JLA were a notorious gang of criminals.

Admittedly, Superman, who was the viewpoint character, eventually discovered that the Joker had done some pretty awful things to Batman in the process (mostly off panel). But most of the story arc amounted to what was more or less an extended tour of the Joker's amusingly surreal (as long as you didn't have to live in it) through the looking-glass version of the DCU. Whatever character deaths and other damage occurred in the course of the story were all undone at the conclusion of the crossover when Superman managed to convince Mxyzptlk that this wasn't fun any more and the indignant imp took his powers back. So the whole thing wound up coming across more like a particularly long, elaborate nightmare or imaginary story than the sort of lastingly traumatic alien invasion/superhero vs. superhero civil war/world turned upside down for real, with permanent consequences, angstfest that seems to have become synonymous with crossovers more recently.

Another, briefer crossover I enjoyed was one involving the X-Men and the original version of WildStorm's Gen 13. I recall this as having been written by Peter David, but I have been unable to confirm this via any of the websites I consulted devoted to Gen 13 or David's bibliography. Unfortunately, I can't remember much about the story except that the X-Men thought the Gen 13 kids were mutants (which they are, sort of, although their previously latent powers had to be triggered by an unscrupulous government experiment) and at one point there was a confrontation between Storm and Gen 13 member Sarah Rainmaker, both of whom have very similar weather control-related powers.

My final favorite crossover story also involves Gen 13. This is the Superman/Gen 13 crossover originally published in 2001 (now collected into trade paperback form), written by Adam Hughes and drawn by Lee Bermejo. In this two-issue story, the teenage heroes of Gen 13 visit Metropolis on vacation, mostly because team leader Caitlin Fairchild is a big fan of Superman and hopes to catch a glimpse of him on his home turf. Caitlin's teammates, on the other hand, think that Superman is a tediously boring old square and a pilgrimage to his adopted city is the lamest idea ever. But it's Fairchild's turn to pick the team's vacation spot, and they respect Caitlin, who's a bit of a square herself — she's a science nerd turned superstrong, semi-indestructible hot babe by the aforementioned government experiment — enough to go along with her choice, however reluctantly.

The Gen 13ers have barely arrived in Metropolis when Caitlin's wish is granted and they find themselves in the midst of a battle between Superman and a giant cyborg gorilla. Fairchild winds up getting knocked out when Supes is flung too hard in her direction by the temporarily triumphant bionic King Kong. When Caitlin regains consciousness, her teammates have lost track of her in the confusion and she's suffering from amnesia and wrapped in Superman's cape, which he had protectively tucked around her before returning to battle. When some interestedly bystanding children respond to her dazed queries of "Who am I?" by suggesting that she might be Supergirl, Caitlin tests this hypothesis by putting her fist through a brick wall and concludes that they must be right. However, she is somewhat troubled by the fact that she seems to have forgotten how to fly.

The rest of the crossover consists of Fairchild's wandering around attempting to execute Supergirl-style superheroics — usually with
disastrous results — and making occasional efforts to fly. Meanwhile, the other members of Gen 13, unable to locate Caitlin on their own in an unfamiliar city, manage to catch up with Superman and insist that he help them find their friend, since whatever happened to her is more or less his fault. Eventually, after successfully working together with the Man of Steel long enough to track down the missing Fairchild, her Gen 13 teammates decide that Superman isn't such a uselessly out of it stuffed shirt after all.

Frankly, I thought the whole "everyone but Fairchild thinks Superman's a boring old authority figure" plotline was somewhat annoying and heavyhanded. But Hughes and Bermejo's characterization of Caitlin, who had always been one of my favorite WildStorm characters, was both insightful and entertaining, as was the story as a whole. Ironically enough, the old-fashionedly nice and traditionally upright Caitlin is significantly more similar to the original version of the Supergirl she was mistaken for than either the then-current Matrix/Linda Danvers/Earth Angel Supergirl created by Peter David or her successor, the revamped post-Crisis Kara Zor-El Mark II, who are both much darker and more complex characters.