After years of their movies going up against each other, Marvel and DC Comics are coming together again on the page with a new crossover.
At this week’s ComicsPro retailer expo, Marvel and DC’s respective editors-in-chief C.B. Cebulski and Marie Javins jointly announced the upcoming event, which they teased would be hitting sometime this year. They didn’t show any artwork or announce a creative team, but according to ComicsBeat’s Heidi MacDonald, this meetup will take the form of two one-shots, Marvel/DC and DC/Marvel.
Longtime comics fans will remember how the Big Two were no strangers to hanging out back in the day. This first took the form of various one-shots in the 1970s and 80s pitting Spider-Man against Superman or the Teen Titans vs. the X-Men. In the late 90s there were DC Versus Marvel and the Amalgam Age comics, wherein each publisher’s respective heroes went up against each other (Batman vs. Captain America or Silver Surfer vs. Green Lantern), sometimes with readers voting on who’d win a particular matchup. The Amalgam books fused heroes together—Dark Claw was Wolverine and Batman, Wonder Woman was Storm, etc.—in a merged universe later canonized as Earth-9602 for Marvel and Earth-496 for DC. (Or Earth-1996 for both.)
In 2003, George Pérez and Kurt Busiek collided the worlds again in JLA/Avengers, a comic first approved all the way back in 1979. There, the heroes of Marvel and DC fought to save one another’s worlds instead of their own (or the combined version of them), which led to both teams thinking the other are terrible at protecting their home dimensions. All three of these crossovers have been republished in the last few years likely to help set the foundation for this new union.
We’ll have more on Marvel/DC and DC/Marvel as news develops.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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