Why do we love crossovers? As I write this they’ve recently announced a crossover between Star Trek and Planets Of The Apes. That’s just plain silly. Heck, we have a comic out now where Groo the Wanderer is teaming with Conan The Barbarian, the guy Groo parodies. On TV the Simpsons and the cast of Family Guy crossed over. It’s one thing when Superman and Batman team up because they’re in the same universe, but at this time next week I’ll be reviewing the first superhero crossover comic with Superman and Spider-Man. So why do we love these so much that they keep getting made?
Sure, the Justice League Of America and the Avengers exist in different universes because they’re owned by different companies. Granted, that didn’t stop a crossover between Ally McBeal and The Practice, who had the same creator but were on different networks. It’s one thing to team up with someone from your own network, publisher, or production company. Battletoads/Double Dragon had the same game publisher, but Mario and Sonic can compete against each other in the Olympics even though they have different publishers who used to be rivals in the console wars. Walker, Texas Ranger and Sammo Law both fought crime on the same night, and even though they were made by different animation studios, teaming The Mask and Ace Ventura because they were both portrayed by Jim Carrey and both cartoons aired on CBS makes some sense. There’s a website devoted to creating comic covers for crossover that may never happen but he wishes they would.
The answer of why we like crossovers ties in to my overall review of JLA/Avengers and also makes a good topic by itself. For our final look at this miniseries it helps to go into the nature of the crossover. This is easily one of, if not the, best. I had one guy on Twitter upset at the early stages of the review and another tweeted that this was the miniseries that ended his 15 year absence from comics. So it’s just about why we like crossovers in general but why this one in particular worked so well.
