Monday, November 17, 2008

Amalgam Comics

I recently re-read the DC vs. Marvel mini-series from 1996. While the mini-series itself is kind of cheesy and forgettable, the one thing I really loved about this crossover is when the universes combined to form the Amalgam universe. I had a faint recollection of that and then got excited when I found six Amalgam issues.

In the Amalgam universe, one character from Marvel was combined with one character from DC to create a new character. Batman and Wolverine are mashed up to create Dark Claw, the Justice League and the X-Men become the JLX and The Flash, The Demon and Ghost Rider are all combined to make Speed Demon.

They published issue #1's, complete with them fighting villains, some origin stories and best of all, little asterisk notes referring to comics that never existed. The Amalgam comics are just pure fun - you could tell the writers really got to be creative with it. They were just one shot issues so you just had 22 pages to tell a good story.

I think I only own about half of the Amalgam comics so hopefully I can find some complete sets on eBay for cheap. I must have started losing interest in comics a while later, because they did a second crossover (of which I only have 3 out of 4 issues) and then a second run of Amalgam one shots a year later. I don't recall any of them. I'm most intrigued by Iron Lantern, though. Sounds badass.

It kind of got me thinking, though...since Marvel is producing its own films now, and DC / Warner Brothers are pretty much the same thing - how awesome would a movie crossover be? I'm sure it would never happen, and they still have SO many stories they can tell individually before they run out of ideas. But how awesome would it be to see a JLA / Avengers movie?

1 comment:

Tyler said...

I never read any of them, but sometimes when I'm on wikipedia looking up comic book stuff, they always have who the person was combined with in the Amalgam Universe. I thought it was a cool concept.

As awesome as a JLA/Avengers movie would be, I don't think we're ever going to see it because there's too much money to be made in separate movies. They should do the smart thing and do like a Teen Titans/New Warriors movie, you know, less of a risk, the fanboys wouldn't be too upset about it, and it would also be cool because it's a cross-over.