The Crossovers That Needed a Treaty

Run a query against this database for the publisher of Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man and the answer comes back as a single string: Marvel; DC. Not Marvel, not DC. Both, joined with a semicolon, as one publisher record.

That is what a truce looks like in a bibliographic catalogue. Two companies who spent decades treating each other as the enemy had to agree on paper, on lawyers, on artists, on who got the cover, and the record of that agreement survives as a compound entry in a database fifty years later.

The inter-company crossover is the strangest category in comics publishing, because it requires the one thing publishers are least equipped to do, which is share. Here is how the treaties got signed, and what the record shows about them.

The two companies had co-published once before, an oversized adaptation of the Wizard of Oz in 1975, which was a licence deal rather than a meeting of universes. The following year they did the real thing.

Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man was a treasury-sized book, printed oversized so neither logo had to be smaller than the other, with a cover that gives each character exactly half the frame. Gerry Conway wrote it, Ross Andru drew it, and the negotiation reportedly ran for a long time over questions that sound trivial and were not: who wins, whose name comes first, whose editorial gets final approval.

Nobody wins. That is the standard solution, and it has been the standard solution ever since.

The 1976 treasury on eBay ›

The 1976 book sold, so three more followed in six years, and they are considerably more obscure than the first.

Superman and Spider-Man returned in Marvel Treasury Edition #28, this time published from the Marvel side. DC Special Series #27 put Batman against the Incredible Hulk. And Marvel and DC Present crossed the X-Men with the New Teen Titans in 1982, by Chris Claremont and Walter Simonson, which is the best of the lot and the one people actually reread.

Then nothing, for twelve years. The companies fell out over terms, and the door stayed shut for over a decade.

When it reopened, it opened in the least likely place. Archie Comics and Marvel put Archie Andrews in a story with the Punisher, and the solution they found to the whose-name-comes-first problem is the most elegant thing in this article.

They published it twice. Archie shipped Archie Meets the Punisher. Marvel shipped The Punisher Meets Archie. Same comic, same interior, different cover logo order and different publisher on the indicia.

This record holds both, as two separate entries under two separate publishers, which is exactly correct and also slightly absurd. The catalogue is not confused. The catalogue is recording what was actually printed, which is two books that happen to contain the same story.

Two years later Marvel and DC went all the way. DC versus Marvel ran four issues, the first from the DC side and alternating from there, and it did the thing the 1976 book had carefully avoided: it picked winners.

Eleven fights were staged. Six were decided by the writers. Five were put to a fan vote, and the results were what a popularity contest produces rather than what a story would: Superman beat the Hulk, Wolverine beat Lobo, Spider-Man beat Superboy, Batman beat Captain America, and Storm beat Wonder Woman. Readers have been arguing about those five ever since, which was presumably the point.

Buried in that crossover was a better idea. Rather than have the characters meet, merge them, and publish the results as though a third company had been making comics all along.

Amalgam Comics produced twelve one-shots in April 1996 and twelve more the following year, each written as issue #1 of a series with years of implied back catalogue. Legends of the Dark Claw is Batman fused with Wolverine. Doctor Strangefate is Doctor Strange fused with Doctor Fate. Spider-Boy is Spider-Man fused with Superboy, and did well enough to earn a team-up book the following year. JLX merges the Justice League with the X-Men and also got a sequel. Bullets and Bracelets is Wonder Woman fused with the Punisher, which should not work and mostly does.

Here is the part that matters to a record keeper. Amalgam was not a publisher. It had no company, no staff and no legal existence, so every one of these books is catalogued under Marvel or under DC depending on which of the two actually printed it, and the collections split the same way. An imaginary publisher's entire output, filed under two real ones.

Amalgam one-shots on eBay ›

Marvel and DC get the attention because they are the ones who needed a treaty. The crossovers that worked more easily were the ones where a licensed property met a superhero, because a licence is a transaction rather than a negotiation between equals.

Batman versus Predator is the model: DC and Dark Horse, 1991, good enough to win awards and to spawn sequels. The record files it under the publisher string DC; Dark Horse, the same compound form as the 1976 treasury, which tells you the arrangement was structurally identical even though the temperature of the negotiation almost certainly was not.

Superman met the Aliens. Batman met Spawn, and then Spawn met Batman, in two books with the running order reversed and different writers, which is the Archie solution applied to a grudge. Batman has since met the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles more than once, successfully enough that it stopped being remarkable.

The crossover readers actually wanted was the Justice League against the Avengers, and it was attempted in the early 1980s with George Perez drawing. It collapsed mid-production when the two companies fell out, with a reported twenty-odd pages of art already finished, and those pages sat unpublished for two decades.

It was eventually made in 2003 and 2004, by Kurt Busiek and the same George Perez, who by then had waited longer for the job than most careers last. The finished series is generally considered the best inter-company crossover ever published, and it is hard to separate that from the fact that everyone involved had wanted it for twenty years.

Three things, none of which you would get from reading the comics.

Joint publisher strings. Marvel; DC. DC; Dark Horse. The catalogue has no way to say two companies published this together except by joining their names, and that compound entry is the only permanent trace of an agreement that took months to reach.

Mirrored titles. Where neither side would accept second billing, the same comic exists twice under two names with two publishers, and a bibliography records two books because two books were printed.

A fictional company's output filed under real ones. Amalgam's twenty-four issues sit in this database split between Marvel and DC, which is both technically correct and a small joke at the expense of the whole exercise.

A note on sources. This is comics history rather than database output, so the account of the negotiations follows the commonly documented record and the article says reportedly where the detail comes from participant recollection rather than paperwork. Publisher strings, titles and issue numbers above were checked against the files on this site. Corrections go to the address in the footer.