So, as I mentioned the other day, my plan is to tackle the book crossover by crossover, and basically review my way through it.
So, what's missing?
Well, most obviously given the title of this cinder block of a collection is 1996's four-issue miniseries DC Vs. Marvel. That's slated to be collected in the upcoming DC Vs. Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, along with all of the Amalgam one-shots, and the two sequel miniseries, DC/Marvel All Access and Unlimited Access. This makes sense, given that the Amalgam comics, each of which featured brand-new heroes that combined DC and Marvel characters, resulted from the events of the DC Vs. Marvel series, as at one point during the proceedings the two fictional universes are fused into a new combined universe.
Also missing is 2003's JLA/Avengers, which is not slated for inclusion in the Amalgam Age Omnibus. It's a curious, and quite unfortunate, omission, as that four-issue crossover series by Kurt Busiek and George Perez is the best of the DC/Marvel crossovers (at least of those that I've read) and one of the better inter-company crossovers of all time.
It's also, one imagines, the single crossover that would be of the greatest interest to the largest number of readers, given not only its quality and the reputation of its creators, but also the current high profile of the two teams, particularly the Avengers, who weren't exactly the household name they are now 20 years ago.
JLA/Avengers was first collected in a 2004 hardcover set, and then again in 2008 as a trade paperback. An extremely limited edition was released in 2022 to help the now late Perez with his medical bills, and demand then was quite high, which made me assume it would be collected herein. Perhaps if these two omnibuses sell well enough DC and Marvel will see fit to also re-release JLA/Avengers.
As for this collection, it actually starts out with some Perez art, as the cover is a Perez piece referencing the first couple of DC/Marvel crossovers, repurposed from the 1991 Crossover Classics collection. (If you bought or buy the omnibus through the direct market though, you also have the opportunity to choose a variant cover edition featuring a new image by Jim Lee and Scott Williams; it's not the greatest work from Lee, and, compositionally at least, is nowhere near as strong or dynamic an image as the Perez cover, but, given Lee's early years as a superstar artist at Marvel followed by a career as an executive at DC, he's probably one of the best choices to produce a cover for a book like this.)
Given just how many pages of comics content there are in this book, it might be surprising that the publishers found room for other miscellanea to include, but there are several introductions and forewords, two afterwords and plenty of backmatter.
First here's a brand-new introduction from Paul Levitz dated February of this year. Levitz notes that he was "in the room where it happened" when it came to that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover that was the very first collaboration between the two publishers, which for a majority of their history were among the most bitter rivals in the industry.
Levitz was, at that time, an assistant editor to DC editor to Gerry Conway, who was chosen by the executives to write the crossover, as he was, at the time, the only person to have written both characters. The art team was similarly chosen to best represent the two publishers and their respective flagship characters: Pencil artist Ross Andru was the only artist to have drawn both characters and was then working as Spidey's primary artist, and inker Dick Giordano was chosen because he was widely regarded as the best inker in the business.
Levitz would go on to be involved in the next round of inter-company crossovers: The next Superman/Spider-Man crossover, that of Batman and The Hulk, and that of the X-Men and Teen Titans, after which things fell apart, and the publishers wouldn't see fit to try again for another decade or so (That decade, of course, was the '90s, the decade in which the vast majority of the stories in this collection were published).
Levitz's introduction is followed by not one, not two, but three forewords, each of which was previously published in the previously mentioned Crossover Classics collection. These are by Conway, Giordano and Tom DeFalco, and all focus on that initial Supes/Spidey book.
The next prose piece, also culled from the pages of Crossover Classics, is by Marv Wolfman, and details how he almost wrote the second Supes/Spidery crossover (Instead, Jim Shooter would get the honor, though the comic's credits include a notation reading "Special thanks to Marv Wolfman for plot suggestions.") He also mentions being pegged to write the second X-Men/Teen Titans crossover...a crossover that never actually came to pass.
That's followed by two story-specific introductions from Crossover Classics, one by Batman/Hulk writer Len Wein and another by X-Men/Teen Titans writer Chris Claremont.
About 300 pages in we get another prose piece original to this volume, this one from long-time Marvel and DC editor Mike Carlin, dated March 2024. In it, he discusses the resumption of DC/Marvel crossovers with 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. This comic, and the dozen or so crossovers that followed, resulted from, as Carlin explains, a new generation of writers and editors coming in at both publishers, ending the "cold war" between Marvel and DC (And it helped that these newcomers were all comics fans turned comics pros, and thus had an entirely different attitude about the characters than their predecessors). He also seems to intimate that a new cold war began in the early years of the century (with JLA/Avengers being the sole exception of new DC/Marvel collaborations), seemingly because "some new players would join the mix in the early 2000s."
After the last pages of 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, we get a pair of afterwords, both written specifically for this collection.
The first is from writer Ron Marz, who is quite familiar with the intercompany crossover, having written the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, as well as Green Lantern/Silver Surfer (and several DC/Dark Horse crossovers). He cites one of the crossovers collected in this book as having reignited his passion for the medium when he was a teenager and had drifted away from super-comics: Claremont and Walt Simonson's X-Men/Teen Titans book, which he reveals he still keeps a copy of in his desk to pull out and flip through whenever he feels the need for inspiration.
That's followed by a very interesting piece by Tom Brevoort, who reveals the original idea for the Superman/Spider-Man team-up was not for a comic book at all, but for a movie. That was the idea of David Obst, the literary agent that kickstarted the first DC/Marvel crossover, anyway. (The idea of such a film sounds pretty insane to even imagine in 1976, two years before the first Superman movie and 26 years before the first Spider-Man movie. Even today, in the years after characters as unlikely as Ant-Man, Aquaman, The Guardians of The Galaxy and Blue Beetle III have all had a movie or two or three, the idea of a DC/Marvel crossover movie still seems so unlikely as to sound crazy.)
Brevoort also discusses a few tidbits about that original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, like the fact that Neal Adams and John Romita Sr. did some uncredited touching up of the art, and the mathematic specificity that went into the story, with each hero appearing in the exact same number of panels and being drawn at the same size in aggregate (If Superman appeared in the foreground and Spider-Man in the distant background of one panel, for example, there would be another panel where Supes was in the background and Spidey foregrounded).
And if you're beginning to think that this sounds like an awful lot of bonus material for a book that pretty much sells itself, wait—there's more!
There's Conway's nine-page story outline for the original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, about 100 pages of art (much of it in black and white) with notes from many of the creators who worked on the pages (Darryl Banks, J.M. DeMatteis, Barry Kitson, Ron Lim, Ron Marz, Roger Stern), the covers from the four Crossover Classic collections (pencilled by Perez, John Romita Jr., Salvador Larroca and Ed McGuinness), Alex Ross' homage to Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (from a 1999 issue of Wizard Magazine), a fold-out of Dan Jurgens' and Ross' cover to Superman/Fantastic Four, a fold-out by John Byrne and Terry Austin promoting DC Vs. Marvel (which also adorns the cover of the collection, under the book jacket), a few pages of house ads promoting the various crossovers and, in the edition I got anyway, a fold-out of Jim Lee's variant cover for the omnibus, full-color on one side and black and white on the other.
It's an awful lot of stuff, without even accounting for the comics stories themselves. As much as it is, it's welcome. This is, after all, a book selling for over a $100—it's labeled for $150, though I didn't pay that much for my copy—so it's nice to see the publishers seemingly doing as much as they can to make it worth that high price.
Now, with all that out of the way, I guess I'm ready to start actually reading the comics themselves, huh?
Next: 1976's Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1
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