$12.95 from Marvel Comics
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You know the gods are in trouble when they start breaking their own rules -- even those rules that never made much sense in the first place. Back when I was very young, team-ups between Marvel and DC Comics were genuine media events, chiefly because both those gargantuan publishers appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming into working together at all. Which was strange, because after all, this is not a very large industry, and most of the major players bounced through their careers between the two companies. Everyone knew one another. But DC and Marvel, big kids on the block that they were, were in direct competition. So even if there was money to be made through the collusion of the two giants, somehow it was very difficult to get it to happen. A few of them did happen: Superman met Spiderman, Batman met the Hulk, and in the absolute best team up, the X-Men met the New Teen Titans, joining in one comic book the two most powerful (in terms of fan excitement) titles of that time. But the Holy Grail of team-ups, the Avengers and the Justice League, remained elusive. Articles at the time, published from both sides of the ongoing and constantly-breaking-down negotiations made it clear that the two giants were too big to get along.
And yet, and yet --
Now, as of just a couple of years ago, everything appears to have changed. Crossover publications between competing companies began to happen with greater and greater frequency. Clearly, the major publishers began to see rewards in answering fan demand, and those rewards were worth overcoming whatever negotiation difficulties the parties for facing. The results are usually works that will appeal greatly to comic book fans, especially hard-core fans. But once again I return to my feeling that if the publishers are finally worrying about the hard-core fans, they’re probably in trouble.
I mention this because I just read through Marvel Comics collection, The Amalgam Age of Comics, which came out in 1996. For those of you who had your heads under rocks, this was a series of comics in which DC and Marvel joined together and created bastardized, "Amalgamated" versions of their most popular comics.
The very idea was a hard-core fan’s dream, and of course you’d have to be a hard-core fan to enjoy it. It's not as if the stories themselves actually hold up as genuinely good stories -- rather, they're a curious, strange sort of postmodern experiment. And for all that, they're a fair amount of fun.
This edition, the Marvel Comics collection, includes one of
my favorites: Bruce Wayne, Agent of SHIELD.
Here, Bruce Wayne has risen through the ranks of SHIELD and has become
their top operative, but his Batman origin remains the same. You have an Amalgamated Nightwing, “Moonwing”
-- Dick Grayson in the Moon Knight costume -- as well as Selina Kyle and the
Joker running Hydra. And
You see? Every story is like this, fever dreams or jokes, except played straight. They’re like those conversations we used to hav bouquet e at comic book conventions, "what it would be like Jack Kirby had invented Batman," etc.
Other stories in this collection include “Spider-Boy,” an amalgam of Spiderman and Superboy; Speed Demon, a strange mixture of Green Lantern, the Demon, and Ghost Rider; Magneto and the Magnetic Men; Bullets and Bracelets, a mesh of, of all things, The Punisher and Wonder Woman, and X-Patrol, a Teen Titans/ X-Men blender. In all, there are some memorable moments. It’s neat to see the in-jokes and absurdities, such as the idea that if Frank Castle, the Punisher, existed in the DC universe, he would not only marry Diana Prince but their son would be raised by Darkseid.
The effect is just like those old What If? stories whose chief attraction was that, since the story didn’t really exist, you can get away with a lot. But it's not satire in the truest sense, and none of it's really particularly clever. This isn't Allan Moore's 1963.
But if you're a fan, I can recommend The Amalgam Age. Once upon a time you never would have seen it.