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Marvel and DC have gone more than two decades without having an inter-company crossover, but that appears to be changing very soon, as reported by The Comics Beat’s Heidi MacDonald at ComicsPro, who reported that DC Editor-in-Chief Marie Javins and Marvel Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski have revealed that the two companies will be doing two intercompany crossovers later this year in the form of two one-shots, DC/Marvel and Marvel/DC.
This will mark the first new crossover between the two companies since the JLA/Avengers miniseries in 2003-04 by Kurt Busiek and George Pérez, which marked the end of a multi-decade history of DC and Marvel crossovers that began in 1976 with Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man.
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Why did Marvel and DC stop doing crossovers?
After the great success of Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, the two companies began doing regular crossovers in the early 1980s, but after a dispute over the original planned JLA/Avengers in 1983, the two companies stopped working together for the rest of the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, the companies began to work together with a pair of Batman/Punisher crossovers. These new crossover books got so common that Marvel and DC even had a FULL crossover event in 1996 with the superheroes from each company fighting the heroes of the other company in DC vs. Marvel (and then even “merged” the companies together briefly for Amalgam Comics).
When Joe Quesada took over as Marvel Editor-in-Chief in the early 2000s, though, he noted that he preferred it when the companies DIDN’T work together, noting, “You know, if you like DC, then you hated Marvel. If you like Marvel, then you hated DC.” However, of course, Quesada allowed the JLA/Avengers crossover to occur a year later.
Longtime DC Publisher Dan Didio was also against the crossovers, though, as Popverse quoted him noting a few years back:
“You’re talking to the one person that stopped every Marvel and DC crossover. I’m going to tell you why I stopped it, and I’m going to say this to everyone. My reason was, when you’re in competition with other places you have to have pride in your own work, and you have to believe in your own material. The only reason I’m crossing over is if I’m having really bad sales or there is a problem with the market. If I have to rely on other companies to prop my characters up, then I’m in bigger trouble than I thought. My second reason was, after that comes out, what do you do next? After you cross that over and you get that big moment, you’re still back in the same place you were beforehand, and now it seems less special, because you just removed so many other things away from it.”
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What changed at Marvel and DC vis a vis crossovers?
Obviously, DC has a new Editor-in-Chief now in Javins, who worked for Marvel for years in the 1990s as an editor and colorist, and she and Celulski had already allowed the release of a collection of the past DC/Marvel crossovers for the first time in years, so the groundwork had already been laid for this new project.
In addition, the two companies worked together in 2022 to release a special edition of JLA/Avengers in honor of Perez, who wanted to see the book in print before he passed away from pancreatic cancer.
So this seemed like it was bound to happen eventually, and “eventually” is happening this year, just in time for both companies to also have major new film releases in July with Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Source: Heidi MacDonald
“}]] DC and Marvel have confirmed that they will have their first inter-company crossover in over two decades Read More