‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the upcoming webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is being illustrated by Amanda Hayes, and the first chapter of the story is set to appear on the web on December 14th.

‘Four Color Memories’ is a column about the comics of our youth, full of nostalgia for the days when heroes were heroes and villains were villains, before the Avengers were DARK and before the Lanterns were BLACK.

To see a directory of previous installments of the column, please click here!

In this week’s column we take a look at the rise of team-ups and crossovers. Loved by many, and despised by many more!

Installment The Fourth,

In Which Worlds Collide

In 1895 an American writer named John Kendrick Bangs produced a remarkable book entitled The Houseboat on The River Styx. It told the tale of a group of “associated shades”, consisting of Napoleon, Shakespeare, Socrates, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, George Washington, Confucius, Hamlet and others, banding together in the afterlife. It proved such a success that it inspired a sequel two years later, this one called The Pursuit of The Houseboat, and featuring none other than the Great Detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. (Bangs was, in fact, the first writer to do a pastiche of Holmes, with Doyle’s permission of course. Holmes was, at the time, dead, having plunged off the Reichenbach Falls.)

This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first example of the crossover, a concept that has become a staple of modern entertainment, hated by some, beloved by others. It’s a concept that appears to be hardwired into the DNA of fans. Not just comic fans, or fans of fantastic literature, either. How many sports fans do you know that haven’t talked about forming the perfect team by mixing and mashing, or perhaps wondered how well Mike Tyson would have fared in a fight with Mohammed Ali?

From the early days of cinema, when Universal introduced Dracula to Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and even Abbott and Costello – to modern television, where the detectives at CSI meet the investigators from Without A Trace – the crossover is now firmly embedded in our culture. Fans are, of course, the worst offenders. A quick perusal of the internet will lead you to fan written stories introducing Mr. Spock to Doctor Who, Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Nicholas Knight or even Harry Potter to the Highlander.

The concept of the crossover first entered the comic world in the pages of All Star Comics in the summer of 1940. That book brought together various superheroes to form the Justice Society of America. Unsurprisingly, this proved popular. Justice Society begat Justice League, Justice League begat The Fantastic Four, The Fantastic Four begat The Avengers, etc. etc.

Marvel’s heroes were more prone to crossover than DC’s. Not just within team books, or eventually team-up books, but within solo titles as well. Daredevil appeared in Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner turned up in Daredevil, The Hulk turned up just about everywhere. (An early case of Wolverine Syndrome.)

In 1976, this penchant for having heroes meet (and usually battle) evolved into the first inter-company crossover, and Superman came face to face with the Amazing Spider-man, in Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man: The Battle of the Century. Written by Gerry Conway, with art by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano, this oversized epic holds up very well today.

It was a major hit and was soon followed up by a second Superman and Spider-man, a Batman and Hulk, and a meeting between the X-Men and The New Teen Titans. Company politics put a temporary halt to the crossovers for awhile, but they came back with a vengeance in the nineties. Not just Marvel & DC, either. Smaller publishers got in the act and soon we had Spawn meeting Batman, Gen13 teaming up with Spiderman and Archie meeting The Punisher. (No, I’m not kidding. Look to your right.)

Many people ignore crossover books these days. They’re often written off as ridiculous or (worst of all) out of continuity. Yet they fill a certain need in us, that desire to know whether Superman could beat the Hulk or Darkseid could best Galactus [ED Note - Darkseid can beat ANYONE]. Yes, it’s an immature need, but it is what it is.

I am, obviously, not immune to the crossover disease. Neither are my friends. Which leads me to today’s little story. I’ve told plenty of embarrassing tales about myself in this column, it’s time I embarrassed someone else. I have a friend that I’ve known for over thirty years. His name is Scott. We met after school one day when I was outside playing with Ricochet Racers, a Captain America one and a Spiderman one. (I know, I know, what’s a Ricochet Racer? Don’t you guys know how to use Google? Okay a Ricochet Racer was a little car that fired out of a large plastic gun. You pumped the gun like a shotgun and the air propelled the car. Got it?)

He thought the cars were cool and we played with them for awhile. Eventually, we realized that we lived in the same apartment building and became good friends. Now Scott wasn’t a life long comic fan like me. In fact, he was barely familiar with them at all. Don’t worry, it didn’t take long for me to get him hooked, and soon he was prowling the racks of the local drug store and indulging his own habit. He fell deep into the Marvel Universe.

Now, I tell you all that, to tell you this. Like any young comic fans, we spent hours talking about pitting one hero against another, or teaming them up to fight various bad guys in huge, hypothetical crossovers. We were both of a creative mind and eventually decided to create our own team of Marvel heroes. We picked our roster (which consisted of Spiderman, Hulk, Iron Fist and Howard The Duck, and no, I don’t remember why), named our group The Fabulous Four (we were so creative) and proceeded to act out stories.

We each took multiple parts and created our little drama in the various fields and woods that surrounded our apartment complex. We set each story up to take about an hour and kept a notebook of what we did. Each story got a title, plot threads continued from one to the next. It was like a TV series, and we improved episode after episode.

We did this, I believe, for about two years. Marvel never did put this particular group together (and who can blame them? Howard The Duck?) but I did commission an artist at a convention to do me a sketch of the four. It’s been a long, long time ago, but I believe the artist was Tom Lyle. The sketch is, alas, lost to posterity.

If any artists reading this feel like playing, do a sketch of The Fabulous Four and I’ll include it in a future column along with a link to your site.

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

The Invisible Skein is still launching on December 14th. Yes, I’m going to say this every week. www.theinvisibleskein.com

I can be found in other places around the net, notably at my blog, http://kpatrickglover.wordpress.com or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kpatrickglover

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