A Universe of Universes Part One
Comics fans love a shared universe. The concept goes all the way back to All Star Comics #3, published November 1940, with the debut of the Justice Society of America. The issue introduced a team including the Atom, the Flash, the Sandman, the Spectre, Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, Dr. Fate, Green Lantern, and Hour Man. The story established that these heroes (all out of the All-American Comics stable) knew each other and got together to swap stories. By the next issue they would unite not just to catch up on each other’s adventures but to take on a common mission.
Before long, heroes from Fawcett and Timely started to share adventures as well. But by the 1950s super-heroes and super-teams had fallen out of favor in comics publishing. The final JSA adventure in All Star Comics #57 (Feb. / Mar. 1951) is generally considered the end of the Golden Age.
Flash forward a few years. In the interim, most super hero comics had ceased publication – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were among the notable exceptions – and had been replaced with horror, romance, Western, war, crime, and science fiction comics. But a super-hero resurgence began in the second half of the 1950s, with the Martian Manhunter in Detective Comics #225 (1955); the Flash in Showcase #4 (1956); and Green Lantern in Showcase #22 (1959). They were followed at the end of 1959 with the introduction of the Justice League of America in The Brave and the Bold #9. The team included Green Lantern, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and The Flash.
The team’s three-issue tryout proved popular enough that it was launched into its own #1 issue less than a year later. One year after that, Marvel Comics published Fantastic Four #1, starring an extended family of super-heroes that echoed older characters but were all-new inventions.
By this time, both DC and Marvel had a publishing history they were eager to mine. In The Flash #123 (July 1961), current-day Flash Barry Allen met Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick. In Fantastic Four #4 (February 1962), the Human Torch met Golden Age anti-hero the Sub-Mariner.
Worlds were colliding. Universes were growing.
Before long, heroes – Marvel heroes, mostly – were bumping into each other all the time. Thor did a fly-by in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1. Iron Man battled the X-Men’s Angel in Tales of Suspense #49. (“Through the courtesy of the editors of the X-Men magazine,” a caption read – one of the best editorial notes ever.)
That note (one of several like it in various Marvel stories) gives us a hint as to what was going on behind the scenes at Marvel. At Marvel, “the editors” were one person: Stan Lee. Marvel didn’t even have an assistant editor on staff when this issue was published in the fall of 1963.
DC, meanwhile, had a bunch of editorial offices, and some of those editors did not like lending their heroes out to appear in other comics. DC’s guest appearances tended to come from within a single office; Green Lantern could appear in The Flash relatively easily because both series were edited by Julius Schwartz, but try getting Mort Weisinger to let you borrow Superman!
By the second half of the 1960s, DC, created a team-up model, with The Brave and the Bold becoming a Batman team-up title in 1966, leading fans everywhere to ask, month after month, “Which one’s brave and which one’s bold?” When it came to super-hero meet-ups, DC never played things as fast and loose as Marvel, though they came close. (And of course Superman, Batman, and Robin shared adventures since 1954 in the pages of World’s Finest Comics, mostly due to shrinking page counts necessitating the combining of Supes’ and Bats’ previously separate adventures.)
Meanwhile, other publishers like Archie and Harvey essentially built in their own shared universes, since their characters interacted constantly – although the Archie gang didn’t usually share space with the likes of Josie and the Pussycats or That Wilkin Boy.
So what made the Marvel and DC universes work so well in the Silver Age and beyond? And why have we seen so many other shared universes fall by the wayside?
My long-held theory is that the gradual pace Marvel and DC of growing those universes drew fans in and made them hungry for more. The idea that at any moment, in any comic, the Fantastic Four could run into Spider-Man was exciting and, in those pre-internet, pre-fanzine days, unpredictable as well. The weird, unexpected team-ups, like Angel showing up in that Iron Man story, gave way to more and more frequent appearances. Following the X-Men going to all-reprint status, individual members of that team kept popping up in titles like Marvel Team-Up, Captain America, the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and more, until they finally graduated back into their own series.
While this was happening, new publishers were popping up with their own approach to shared universes by declaring from day one that all their series were interconnected. We’ll look at them next time.