Let’s talk crossovers

I just finished reading the Conan/Wonder Woman crossover, which was actually done very well, and it made me think about all the crossovers that I’ve read through the years. That’s why this week’s entry is all about crossovers.

Crossovers are the ultimate “what if”. Could this character beat that character in a fight? What would happen if these two characters met? Within the same universe, this happens all the time. But when it’s two characters from different publishers or franchises, it’s always exciting to see what happens.

I remember when I discovered comic books for the first time. I was just 7 years old and had a friend who was two years older than me, who already had some comics. One of those books was the classic Superman vs Spider-Man crossover. I didn’t know about Marvel or DC at the time, so I didn’t think it was too big of a deal. But later on, when I really got into comics myself, I found out that this was actually the very first time that a DC and Marvel character met and that it certainly was a big deal.

Talking about Marvel/DC crossovers; those are of course the ones that everyone got really excited about. To this day, that is still the stuff of many discussions. But if you look at the early ones like Superman vs Spider-Man, Batman vs The Incredible Hulk and Uncanny X-Men/New Teen Titans, then the funny thing is that they don’t give any explanation as to why these characters never met before. Apparently they had heard about each other, but they just never met, which I even thought was kind of strange as a kid. Luckily, in later crossovers like Avengers/JLA and Marvel vs DC, they did make an effort to explain how these encounters came to be.

But those are just the crossovers between the “big two”. Of course there have been many more, especially in the nineties. With Image becoming a serious player in the superhero comic world and Dark Horse owning the rights to publish comics based on a couple of big sci-fi movie franchises, the possibilties became endless.

But were all these crossovers really that good? To be honest with you: no. Some were actually pretty bad. As exciting as it often seemed that some of these characters were finally going to meet, it was often a disappointment when you finished the book. Sure, there were some really good ones too, but when there’s two characters owned by different parties, it’s often hard to get a good story done, without one character looking better than the other or the story having an impact on one of the chracters.

But like I said, there were a bunch of really cool ones too. Batman vs Predator was done very well and so was the Batman/Judge Dredd crossover. Come to think of it, most of the crossovers including Batman were actually pretty good. And I really liked the X-Men/Star Trek TNG one too. And even though I own (and have read) a lot of these crossovers, there must have been a lot of them that I missed out on.

Of all these franchises, there is only one that has never had any crossovers. As long as there have been Star Wars movies, there have also been Star Wars comics, by Marvel and Dark Horse. And even though a lot of other sci-fi and movie franchises have done comic book crossovers, that has never been the case with Star Wars in the 40+ years that it’s been around. As far as I can remember, the only crossover that Star Wars ever did, wasn’t in a comic book, but in a TV show. When Luke, Artoo and Threepio appeared in an episode of the Muppet Show 😉