DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 17: Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1

DC and Marvel might not have gotten to every conceivable crossover of interest. But between all of the one-shot crossovers in the pages of DC Versus Marvel Omnibus and the various event miniseries collected in DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, I think it's safe to say that, by the end of the '90s, the two publishers had released comic books featuring many of the configurations of characters that their audiences were likely to be most interested in (Save, of course, for the failed Justice League/Avengers crossover, which they would eventually get around to in 2003). 

In fact, by the time the decade ended, DC and Marvel were even repeating particular pairings, publishing a second meeting between Batman and Spider-Man and, of course, a second Batman/Daredevil pairing, which would end up being the last DC/Marvel crossover...with the exception of that JLA/Avengers one a few years later.

While 1997's Daredevil and Batman was created by a previous Daredevil team, that of D.G. Chichester and Scott McDaniel, this time it's a DC team at the helm: Alan Grant, who wrote various Batman titles throughout the '90s, and Eduardo Barreto, an incredibly gifted artist who had worked steadily for DC throughout the '80s and '90s, working on several Batman specials in the latter decade.

His art is always welcome, and it's a special treat in this particular collection, where his contribution is one of the best drawn in the entire tome (up there alongside Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano's DC Special Series #27 and Steve Rude and Al Milgrom's The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman). 

As was the case with the Titans/X-Men crossover that immediately preceded the last cessation of DC/Marvel crossovers, the quality of this particular one doesn't seem to be to blame for the temporary end to the cooperation. It's just about as good as the best of any of the 18 earlier DC/Marvel crossover, and far better than a few. 

Rather, if the blame isn't the changes in leadership at the two publishers, as various prose pieces in the collection seem to suggest, it may just be as simple as fan and market exhaustion of the crossovers, which had been coming at a pretty steady clip since they resumed with Batman/Punisher in 1994. 

While that's just a guess, I have to imagine that, at the very least, the DC/Marvel crossovers had lost that feeling of being rare or special during the course of those six years or so, given how many of them were published in such a relatively short span of time.

But anyway, back to this crossover. 

Grant seems to have constructed the entire thing around one particular meeting of two characters...and not those whose names are in the title. Rather, Grant seemed to want to pit Daredevil, who is nicknamed "The Man Without Fear", against Batman villain The Scarecrow, the self-proclaimed master of fear, whose entire modus operandi is to attack his victims by scaring them ("Modus operandi", by the way, is a term I first learned from reading another Alan Grant-written inter-company crossover that also featured The Scarecrow as its villain) . 

That scene plays out in a short, five-page sequence at the climax of the book. The Scarecrow sprays Daredevil directly in the face with an aerosol bottle containing his fear gas, exposure to which subjects a victim to his or her greatest fear.

"Taste fear, my friend!" The Scarecrow grins, the border of his dialogue balloon wavy and jagged to suggest his spooky voice.  

And in the next panel Daredevil covers his eyes and wheels backward. 

A big panel that dominates the bottom two-thirds of the page is then devoted to Daredevil with his eyes and mouth wide open, various fears apparently running through his mind, Barreto's art depicting five different DD villains, one of whom I didn't recognize, while Grant's melodramatic narration notes just how powerful the gas is ("Another man-- any other man--would crack beneath that onslaught of pure, untainted fear--").

A turn of the page finds Daredevil apparently angrily laughing at the dark sky above, while the narration box reads, "But Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. Defiantly, he throws back his head and laughs in its face!"

"Taste fear yourself, creep!" Daredevil then quips, kicking The Scarecrow over the railing of the torch on the Statue of Liberty, where the four-way battle at the end of the book plays out. 

Of course, Daredevil has his own rogue—or rogues plural, I guess, as he's become a legacy character—who use fear gas as a weapon, the simply named Mister Fear (The first of whom appeared in 1965, well after The Scarecrow debuted).

I wonder, then, if such a scene has previously occurred in Daredevil history, just as I wonder why Grant didn't use any of the various versions of Mister Fear (provided any of them were alive at that point in 2000) to pair with The Scarecrow. Instead, Grant resorted to DD's archenemy, The Kingpin (Who, as we saw, already appeared in a pretty good DC/Marvel crossover, one that also featured Batman). 

(Other decent Batman/Daredevil rogue combinations that would remain unexplored? The Joker and The Jester, and The Penguin and The Owl.)

In this particular story Batman oddly, even counter-factually describes The Scarecrow as a villain who "dabbles in organized crime when the mood takes him" (I've read all of The Scarecrow's appearances throughout the decade of the '90s, most of which were written by Grant himself, and he never once showed any real interest in organized crime beyond hiring thugs to do manual labor or protect him). The conflict driving the book basically rests on that description, though, as this is a story in which Gotham City mad scientist-turned-terrorist The Scarecrow attempts to muscle in on Kingpin's New York City turf, using his prowess with mind-altering chemicals to essentially mind-control criminals into following him. 

The story opens with Daredevil on the trail of Catwoman, the latter of whom Barreto draws a particularly svelte and sexy version of, as she essentially resembles a nude female form that happens to be colored the purple and black of her then-costume. She has apparently stolen a particularly important thing from the Manhattan safe of New York law firm Shane, Murdock and Nelson: Their files on Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk's operations. That means, in Daredevil's words, 

Details of meets, associates, businesses owned. Suspicions concerning his activities. Everything a lawyer would need if he were putting a brief together!

Why would anyone want that? Well, that's precisely why Daredevil has followed Catwoman back to Gotham. He's about to bust up her rooftop meet with a pair of criminals, when his senses pick up on Batman about to foil it, so he intercepts the Dark Knight mid-air. Batman naturally fights back and the pair of vigilantes—as well as the head of a stone gargoyle—crash to the rooftop. 

Catwoman gets away with the case as Batman and Daredevil beat up the remaining bad guys. The criminals refuse to talk, but they give up a clue that Batman's Batcave computers manage to decipher anyway: They were apparently subjected to the The Scarecrow's fear gas. And, indeed, readers see Catwoman meet up with Scarecrow on another roof top after losing the vigilantes. 

(If, like me, you have a particular interest in how different artists depict The Scarecrow, I suppose I should here note that his design here is basically that which was seen in the 1993 Shadow of The Bat arc "The God of Fear" drawn by Bret Blevins, only with straw "hair" reminiscent of the Tim Sale design. Or, perhaps even more closely, Barreto's own take on the Batman: The Animated Series design...that of Scarecrow's second appearance in the series, but well before the redesign with the hat noose around his neck.) 

Despite their rough meeting at the beginning of this one-shot, the two heroes decide to work together again, while both the narration and their dialogue will refer back a few times to their initial meeting, in 1997's Daredevil and Batman #1. (Is it worth noting again that their previous crossover bore an "Elseworlds" logo, while this one does not...?).

They follow what clues they can find to a trap set by The Scarecrow, who has apparently been shipping guns to New York...guns covered with a version of his fear chemicals that allows him to instantaneously hypnotize almost anyone who comes into contact with it. In this manner, he takes over Kingpin's operation. 

"Scarecrow's the King of New York now!" as an underling reports to Kingpin about the Gotham criminal having taken over his opeartion...just before Kingpin throws said underling out a window.

Daredevil and Batman soon come calling, trying to urge Kingpin to cooperate, as they've found evidence that Scarecrow has brought cannisters of fear gas with him, and thus has his sights set on something other than becoming New York's new Kingpin of Crime. He wants to attack the city with his fear gas.

Kingpin doesn't just refuse to cooperate with the heroes, but he apparently climbs into an attack helicopter off-panel and then tries to gun them down on a rooftop, before piloting it towards the high point where he assumes The Scarecrow will go to release his gas on the city: The Statue of Liberty.

Scarecrow shoots his chopper down, but the huge Kingpin forces his way through the tiny windows in the statue's crown...just as Batman and Daredevil arrive via speedboat, making awfully good time, considering Kingpin's head start and his, you know, being in a helicopter.

This leads to the climactic battle, in which the two heroes take on one another's villains, leading to the scene between Daredevil and Scarecrow detailed above, which occurs as Batman goes hand-to-hand against Kingpin (As the two didn't come to blows in the earlier Batman & Spider-Man, I suppose this gives readers a chance to see the two fight one another, although the fight is inconclusive, with Kingpin simply deciding to stop fighting after he learns DD has taken out Scarecrow).

In the end, as is ever the case with such books, the status quo for all of the characters essentially resets itself, with The Scarecrow being captured and apparently being taken back to Arkham Asylum (Daredevil of course caught him with his billy club-on-a-wire thingee after kicking him over the railing), and Kingpin walking, as the masked vigilantes can't really accuse him of any wrong-doing without unmasking and personally testifying against him. 

And as the two heroes pointed their boat towards the New York City horizon, the era of DC/Marvel crossovers drew to a close...

Well, almost. 

There was still the aforementioned JLA/Avengers yet to go. That wouldn't ship for another three years (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was at least being discussed and maybe even developed at the time that this crossover was published), and it would differ in some key ways from the other, previous DC/Marvel crossovers collected in this omnibus, the most obvious of which being that it was given an entire four-issue miniseries, rather than occurring in a single, oversized one-shot, making it more similar to the three crossovers collected in the other, second DC/Marvel omnibus, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus. 

I'll be circling back to review its contents in three future posts, detailing 1996's DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was called Marvel Versus DC) and its attendant Amalgam Comics tie-ins, 1996-1997's DC/Marvel: All Access (and its Amalgam tie-ins) and, finally, 1997-1998's Unlimited Access. 

Next: 1996's DC Versus Marvel