BW Media Spotlight

This cameo not approved. The comic he’s from is.

I have a bunch of stuff in my Watch Later and Filler Video playlist (both private, so you won’t see them on my YouTube channel) that I need to go through and put up here at the Spotlight. Among them are panels from conventions both public and the pandemic-spawned “at home” variety, longform documentaries, and stuff like that. Let’s get this one out of the way.

In this very old Jake & Leon comic, #17 to be exact (the first of three), when I was still doing them longways on the back of my weekly comic checklist printout, I dropped Ringo here in to promote a comic series that intrigued me. Crossoverlord wasn’t just a nifty pun, it was a crossover of numerous superhero webcomics. It followed a villain who had appeared in Linkara’s The Lightbringer comic, which he gets a lot of flack on and really hates the comic and the way it turned out himself, but I found some merit in the concept at least. The villain was at the time known only as The Smiling Man, because he smiled all the time. This villain’s schemes through the multiverse would drag in heroes Mindmistress, Daisen, Mechagical Girl Lisa A.N.T.,  Superdan of Bad Guy High Adventures, The Green Avenger, and some character I don’t remember from the comic Indefensible Positions. It was a fun crossover and one of my inspirations to create something like Captain Yuletide once my art skills got past…well, look at the comic above and furthered the idea that the internet could be a way to get comics out into the universe. These weren’t big names but they were pretty cool.

Granted the only hero I would really follow from this and the sequel, Crossoverkill, in which someone was collecting the personification of death in various realities and would bring a few new character in with the returning ones, was Fusion, but that was a mix of personal tastes, what I have time to read (Fusion has been on a very long hiatus if it isn’t officially done like some of my other favorite webcomics), and what’s still online. Also new to that chapter was (easier to copy/paste from a list) Energize, Valkyrie Yuuki, Majestic Knight, Captain Perfect and Hoodoo, alongside returning hero Mindmistress. Both comics also had other cameos of online superhero characters. Sadly a third sequel was not produced after her creator and writer/artist, Al Schroder, passed away. It’s a great series of crossovers and if you haven’t read it, this site collected both series and some tie-in stories from a couple of the contributing sites. Oddly it doesn’t have the Smiling Man’s appearances in The Lightbringer according to the archive.

In the video below, some of the contributors to the original Crossoverlord got together in 2013 to remember the webcomic superhero crossover and plans for future crossovers that didn’t happen after this video was made. Since Ringo ended up in three of my comics, all of them rather old of course, and as fanart since I didn’t actually ask permission but wanted to promote both crossovers, I thought it would be interesting to see what brought these various creators together for this collaboration. It includes background information and concept art for the project.

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