A brief DC Versus Marvel interlude

In my review of 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, and probably elsewhere throughout my series reviewing the history of DC/Marvel crossovers, I talked a bit about how the publishers stopped cooperating on crossover comics after that particular book was published. 

It would be 12 more years before DC and Marvel would work on a crossover of their characters again, not resuming them until 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. 

From the outside looking in, suspending the crossovers didn't seem to make much sense. Those first four were all pretty solid comics; a couple of them even great comics. They seem to have sold like gangbusters, and both the fans who read them and the pros who made them seemed to enjoy the relatively rare opportunity of seeing the rival publishers' characters interacting.

Whatever exactly happened, it seemed to center on the proposed fifth crossover, a George Perez-drawn pairing of the Justice League of America and the Avengers. I did a little Googling and found at least one player's version of events as to what exactly happened on his blog, but I didn't comment or even share a link to it here, not wanting to wade into 40-year-old dispute that occurred when I was in kindergarten.

Well, just this week I found a very thorough accounting of the collapse of the original JLoA/Avengers crossover, one that was based on reporting in the fan press at the time, public statements from many of the participants and apparently original interviews with some of the men involved. 

That would be the late KC Carlson's oral history of the project, which he apparently put together after being asked to write a piece for the collection of the 2004 JLA/Avengers crossover. 

Carlson's piece didn't end up appearing in that collection, however, and, once you read it, you'll see why: No one comes out looking particularly good. Rather than one actor or another being the villain in the story, the book seems to have been doomed by a series of bad decisions, miscommunication, some unprofessional behavior and a lot of hard feelings. And the damage done was apparently significant enough to put a stop to DC and Marvel's cooperation with one another for over a decade.

While Carlson's piece didn't end up in a JLA/Avengers book, The Beat eventually published it in a series of two posts in 2022. You can read the first one here. 

If you've been reading the DC/Marvel crossovers as I have lately, it seems like a pretty valuable piece of the behind-the-scenes story, one that explains not only what happened to that particular crossover but also answers the question as to why the two publishers stopped working together for so long. (Also? The Beat posts are illustrated by some great Perez art originally produced for the crossover, like the image atop this post.)

Now if only someone would do all the necessary interviews to write a piece explaining why DC and Marvel ceased publishing crossovers again after 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York, and then why they temporarily resumed cooperating just long enough to finally publish JLA/Avengers...