Header image from Marvel. Drawn by David Marquez
Big news this week from Marvel, it’s publishing a Star Wars / Marvel crossover series. Is this the first time that Star Wars has crossed over with another franchise?
Inter universe crossovers have definitely become more popular. After a splurge in the 70s and 90s when we had the whole DC / Marvel crossover palaver, Spawn / Batman, Judge Dredd / Batman, the Amalgam universe and most bizarrely Punisher / Archie. Most recently we’ve had Superman / Spider man and Batman / Deadpool (definitely worth a read), and vice versa obviously.
Art by Frank Quitely
It’s not the first time that Marvel Heroes have crossed over with science fiction properties, and probably handy that both Lucasfilm and Marvel are owned by the House of the Mouse. Marvel have a good track record lately with this kind of thing, notably with Aliens / Avengers, which was very warmly received and delivered by the excellent creative team of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic and a slew of Predator / Marvel Universe crossovers.
Art by Esad Ribic & Ive Svorcina
Similarly, this has Kevin “Clerks” Smith as writer, who is no slouch with his comics work, art is by David Marquez, an equally fine artist. So what to expect? How would it work? Wolverine teaming up with Han Solo, Luke going up against Doctor Doom?
Art by John Buscema and Stan Goldberg
The best crossovers are the ones where they don’t seem forced. There is some base logic in the most crossovers in that they are in grounded (ish) universes where each character could conceivably exist in its partner’s universe and vice versa. Star Wars is different to the other franchises in that it’s more science fantasy that science fiction and there is no obvious intersection between a galaxy, far, far, away and Earth 616.
How will this work? How will the two universes interact? Who knows? Or rather, editorial, Kevin Smith and David Marquez will hopefully have an idea by now. Maybe Marvel will just ignore that and just throw them together, or there will be some tortuous device / macguffin bringing characters together. There can be a lot of fun to be had with these crossovers, and there has been, but they can also go horribly wrong.
Rrecommended past efforts are Frank Miller and Walt Simonson’s Dark Horse published Robocop vs Terminator, the first Batman Vs Predator and Judge Dredd Vs Aliens. Aliens vs Predator started in (Dark Horse) comics, so anticipation is high, but we’ll have to wait until January to find out.
