#Comic book crossover definition full#

Secret Wars was a blatant multimedia cash grab – Mattel, a toy company, licensed Marvel’s heroes for action figures on the condition that there was a story that would give kids an excuse to mash their toys together.

#Comic book crossover definition full#

The dawn of the “event” crossover as a product came in the mid-1980s, first with Marvel’s first Secret Wars in 1984 and shortly thereafter with DC’s first full reboot, Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC Comics alone has had three massive continuity overhauls in the last 15 years alone- Flashpoint/ The New 52 in 2011 Rebirth in 2018 and Infinite Frontier in 2021-along with several line-wide shifts and new initiatives, and Marvel, while they have never technically rebooted their continuity, completely destroyed the multiverse in 2016’s Secret Wars, and has had a similar number of new initiatives.

“Nowadays, it’s about pushing the customer into multiple products.”Īnd push they do. “Back then, the idea was just to further a storyline,” says Brent Moeshlin of Alabama’s Quality Comix, one of the biggest vintage comics dealers in the United States. Right before Marvel had Spider-Man swinging through the world outside the Fantastic Four’s windows, the folks at DC decided to put all of their Flashes in the same book with The Flash #123, “The Flash of Two Worlds.” And since then, audiences couldn’t get enough- Amazing Spider-Man #1 in 1963 had Spidey trying to get a gig with the Fantastic Four, and later that year, the Justice League met their Justice Society counterparts in Justice League #21’s “Crisis on Earth-One.” And that one might be, if you squint hard enough, the first superhero comic summer crossover, an event that would change the world of comics collecting. Roughly speaking, comic book shared universe continuity didn’t really take hold until 1961.