For most of us , the crosswalk is an established part of the landscape of popular culture . We ’ve see it all before , whether it ’s the Avengers , Eureka ’s Fargo confab Warehouse 13 , or members of Star Trek meet the Legion of Superheroes . But you ’ll be surprised to learn just how previous the crossover really is , and how many sort of the crossover there have been — even Sherlock Holmes got in on the action .
The crossing over can be defined as a story in which characters or concepts from two or more distinct textual matter or series of schoolbook meet . Historically there have been eight major types of crossovers : the merger of myths ; crossovers in which one writer ’s characters are bring together by another author ; crossovers within one writer ’s fictional universe ; crossovers in which the characters from different creators are brought together by another creator ; the afterlife or Bangsian fantasy ; the use of real people as fictional characters ; crossover voter where character reference from different God Almighty are fetch together to take form a team ; and crossing where a fancied world comprise characters from numerous authors .
The Argonauts and Cloudcuckooland
One potential first historical crossing is the Hellenic myth . They were a deductive reasoning of legends from Indo - European invaders and the local , pre - Hellenic religions . One of these syntheses was the myth of Jason and the Argonauts . The myth , whose early material body date stamp to the 9th or 10th century B.C. , is about the hero Jason , who sail to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece , accompanied by a band of fifty notable hero sandwich . Many of these heroes , including Castor , Polydeuces , and Hercules , were the theme of myths of their own . The received account of this myth is the Argonautica ( 3rd century B.C.E. ) of Appolonius of Rhodes , which unite earlier disperse versions of the myth into a connected tarradiddle . By bring the heroes of various disparate myths together into one tale Appolonius perform one of the first crossover voter in popular culture .
This case of crossover , in which characters from folklore and legend see in new stories , would look in a motley of cultures over the next twenty centuries . Around 150 A.D. Lucian of Samosata wrote The True History , a satire have one of the early trips into tabu space . During the misstep Lucian and his companions vanish past Cloudcuckooland , the float fortress of the birds from Aristophanes ’ The Birds ( 414 B.C.E. ) . In the Middle Ages the taradiddle of King Arthur were synthesize by the Gallic author Chrétien de Troyes out of several pre - existent sources , include Celtic and Welsh stories and various legend of the Holy Grail . In the 17th and 18th century the rise in wide - distributed fabrication in Great Britain and Europe , via chapbooks , centime novelette , the canards of France , and the volksbüchlein of Germany , run to an addition in crossover voter , so that an anonymously - penned c. 1760s volksbüchlein portrayed Dr. Faustus meeting German beguiler figure Till Eulenspiegel .
Ongoing existence
The second significant eccentric of crossover get down in 1834 , when Honoré de Balzac start out linking his novels into a coherent , whole , single fictional universe . Before that year Balzac ’s novel had possessed an internal consistency , but it was only in 1834 that he consistently begin making habit of recurring characters , with 23 of them appearing in the first version of Le Père Goriot ( 1835 ) . Almost 600 repeat characters seem in the nearly 90 Word of God that make up Balzac ’s La Comédie Humaine cps of novel .
The approximation of a macrocosm of one generator ’s characters was not young with Balzac . In the 18th 100 British writers routinely invented subsequence for their pet characters . The 1709 Statute of Anne , the first modernistic copyright constabulary , shifted the right of ownership of texts from companies to authors , but pop sentiment went against the Statute , and a number of writers produced wildcat but pop “ further adventure of . ” One far-famed subsequence was George Sackville Carey ’s Shakespeare ’s Jubilee , A Masque ( 1769 ) , in which Falstaff is “ good luck charm - call’d from his quiet grave ” to see the 1769 Stratford Jubilee . Falstaff is taunted by Oberon and Puck and kidnapped by the enchantress from Macbeth , but eventually allowed to march in the Jubilee forward motion alongside Caliban , Pistol , and the rest period of Shakespeare ’s best characters . Shakespeare ’s Jubilee can be seen as an other variant of fanfiction , but it also functions as one of the first example of one author ’s character , from dissimilar fictional universes , being sew together together into one fictitious universe by another author .
But Balzac was the first 19th century author to make an on-going fictional universe in an unionised and challenging direction . Several other French authors imitated Balzac , include Alexandre Dumas père , detective writer Emile Gaboriau , mush novelist Paul Féval , and Emile Zola . The most notable example of this function of relate , reappearing characters occurs in the novels of Jules Verne , which are nearly all interconnected , from Five Weeks in a Balloon ( 1863 ) to The Ice Sphinx ( 1897 ) .
The concept of the recurring fictitious character cross different serial became progressively common in the late 19th C . crossing over in which an author had two of his or her serial persona meet were no longer unusual in either mellow or popular cultivation . Albert Aiken wrote storey about detective Joe Phenix and highwayman Dick Talbot for two dissimilar dime novel , and brought them both together in Beadle ’s New York Dime Library#419(1886 ) , in a report in which Phenix pursue Talbot but go wrong to hold back him . Luis Senarens compose Edisonade ( proto - steampunk boy discoverer ) stories about Frank Reade and Jack Wright in several different dime bag novels , and had the duo raceway around the macrocosm for a $ 10,000 trophy in Happy Days#1 - 8 ( 1894 ) . This type of crossover uphold into the 20th century in the American pulps and British storey papers .
Fiction as a Quilt : sew together Together From Scraps
The first unfeignedly modern crossover voter , in which type from dissimilar creators are brought together in a tale by another Godhead , was create in 1849 , when Mary Cowden Clarke put out Kit Bam ’s Adventures ; or , The Yarns of an Old Mariner . In the novel Kit Bam , a retired skimmer , tells a chum and sister about his adventure . Bam ’s shipmates are analogues for Shakespeare , Chaucer , Spenser , Johann Paul Richter , and Shelley , and in his wanderings Bam see characters from Grecian and Arthurian myths , The Arabian Nights , Bernardin de Saint - Pierre ’s Paul et Virginie ( 1794 ) , William Painter ’s Palace of Pleasure ( 1566 - 1575 ) , Richter ’s Himmelsschlüssel ( 1796 ) , Shakespeare ’s Othello ( 1604 ) and The Tempest ( 1612 ) , Coleridge ’s “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ” ( 1798 ) , and Mary Shelley ’s Frankenstein ( 1818 ) .
The approximation of a character meeting other God Almighty ’ characters while go was used by several source in the 19th and early 20th century . Henry Lee Boyle ’s Kennaquhair ( 1872 ) is about a Utopian metropolis in which various fictional characters dwell . The narrator is escorted through Kennaquhair by Yorick from Shakespeare ’s Hamlet and meet a number of fabricated characters , including Mrs. Sairey Gamp from Charles Dickens ’ Martin Chuzzlewit . Another author to use traveling as the fomite for a crossover voter was Walter de la Mare , who in Henry Brocken ( 1904 ) had the titulary character meet Shakespeare ’s Titania and Bottom , Bronte ’s Jane Eyre and Rochester , Cervantes ’ Rosinante and Don Quixote , Poe ’s Annabel Lee , and Swift ’s Houyhnhnms .
Ghosts in Hell
The next major crosswalk is the hereafter or “ Bangsian ” fantasy , about an afterlife in which the ghosts of far-famed mankind and char come together and have various ( usually genial ) adventure . The hereafter has been used for C as a group meeting earth for case from different Maker . One other instance is Virgil ’s Aeneid ( c. 29 - 19 B.C.E. ) , in which Aeneas sees a figure of hoagie and heroines from early Greek heroic poem . John Kendrick Bangs began a new trend in hereafter fantasies with The Houseboat on the River Styx ( 1895 ) . In Houseboat most of the ghosts are of veridical the great unwashed , including Shakespeare and George Washington , but the ghosts of Hamlet , Yorick , Adam , Shem , Noah , and Ophelia also appear . In Bangs ’ subsequence , The Pursuit of the Houseboat ( 1897 ) , the ghosts of fabricated characters come out : Sherlock Holmes ( Holmes had “ give-up the ghost ” in A. Conan Doyle ’s “ The Final Problem ” ) , Shakespeare ’s Shylock , Emile Gaboriau ’s Lecoq , Tom Taylor ’s Hawkshaw , and Harlan P. Halsey ’s Old Sleuth .
In Mexico in the 1950s the hereafter fantasy return as a film zep - genre in which a issue of spectre were shown to be haunting the same house or flat . This submarine - genre began with Adolfo Fernandez Bustamente ’s La Rebelión de los Fantasmas ( 1949 ) , in which an sure-enough house in Mexico City , schedule to be demolish , is populate by the ghosts of La Llorona , Samson , Don Quixote , Romeo & Juliet , Chopin , Paganini , Tutankhaman , and The Wandering Jew , none of whom are disposed to take the demolition softly . La Rebelión de los Fantasmas was popular and engender legion copycat .
The Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes ’ appearing in The Pursuit of the Houseboat was his first show after his “ death ” in 1893 , and the first use of Holmes by a writer other than A. Conan Doyle . Holmes apace became the subject of potpourri and crossovers , far more so than any other individual character . The first crossover involving Holmes and another serial character is in Maurice LeBlanc ’s “ Arsène Lupin ” story , “ Sherlock Holmes Arrive Trop Tard ” in Je Sais Tout#17(1906 ) . ( After pressure from A. Conan Doyle ’s lawyer the form of address of the story was changed to “ Herlock Sholmes Arrive Trop Tard ” ) .
Crossovers involve the employment of fictionalized versions of veridical people became vulgar in the last decade of the 19th century and the first X of the 20th century . celebrity have often been used by source in their stories , but before the hike of the news program medium in the nineteenth hundred these man and cleaning lady were the Cartesian product of folklore , like British highwayman Dick Turpin ( 1705?-1739 ) rather than realism . The emergence of the newspaper in the 19th century allowed individuals other than heads of United States Department of State to become internationally experience , and allow them to be used by author as supporting quality in serial fiction . Thomas Byrnes ( 1842 - 1910 ) became a interior celebrity for his transformation of the N.Y.P.D. into a modernistic , professional police personnel . He was incorporated into at least eight different dime bag novel police detective serials in the 1890s as “ Superintendent Byrnes ” or “ Inspector Byrnes ” and the human race responsible for give Nick Carter ( or Broadway Billy or Dave Dotson or Gideon Gault ) their ordering . During the year of his presidential term Theodore Roosevelt was almost as democratic a depicted object for appearance in the dime bag novels , as were the internationally famous strongman Eugen Sandow ( 1867 - 1925 ) and the Russian double - agent Evno Azef ( 1869 - 1918 ) .
Internationally the crossover became much more common than exceptional in the 1910s and 1920s . The spread of American and British democratic literature through Europe , Africa , and Asia in the later 19th and early twentieth century , and the international growth in the technology of the pop press , led to European , African , and Asian generator copy American and British authors and save crossovers of their own . In 1921 the Formosan writer Cheng Xiaoqing began a series of crossovers between his character Huo Sang and Lu Ping , a series character produce and written by Sun Liaohong . The gag of the crossovers is that Huo Sang commence life as a Sherlock Holmes copy and was deliberately written and bill as “ the Oriental Sherlock Holmes , ” while Sun Liaohong had create Lu Ping in imitation of Maurice LeBlanc ’s Arsène Lupin ( the similarity in public figure is calculated ) . The first affaire d’honneur between Huo Sang and Lu Ping was an court to LeBlanc ’s first Holmes - Lupin crossover , “ Herlock Sholmes Arrive Trop Tard , ” and like LeBlanc ’s narration the Huo Sang - Lu Ping duel took on a sprightliness of its own and was repeated in several dissimilar stories .
The most notable crossover in American pulp magazine direct position in the Street & Smith westerly Wild West Weekly ( 1927 - 1943 ) . Like many pulps , Wild West Weekly had a spread out cast of regularly - appearing type . Some of these characters , like Paul Powers ’ Johnny Forty - Five , appeared for nearly the entire fourteen years of Wild West Weekly ’s world . Wild West Weekly ’s two editor , Ronald Oliphant and John Burr , encouraged their writer to have the serial characters meet each other , so that J. Allan Dunn ’s Whistlin ’ Kid meet Paul Powers ’ Sonny Tabor , and Tabor meet Ben Conlon ’s Pete Rice , and Pete Rice met Cleve Endicott ’s Billy West , and so on . The accumulative essence was to make a share universe . This took position to a much keen degree in the German heftromans of the 1930s , when legion crossovers and team - ups between series characters were write . ( In my next column I ’ll describe how the German heftromans created the first Marvel / DC - comparable shared creation ) .
team and Societies
The next significant type of crossover , in which character from unlike creators are brought together as a team , appeared in a funny book in 1940 rather than in a book or flesh magazine . By 1940 the idea of a crossing over featuring a squad of character from unlike creators was well known . The Argonauts were such a squad , as was the radical of detectives in Pursuit of the Houseboat . In 1905 Carolyn Wells make such a squad in the first of five “ Society of Infallible tec ” level . Presided over by Sherlock Holmes , the Society fill to figure out offence . Their rank is Jacques Futrelle ’s S.S. “ The Thinking Machine ” Van Dusen , E.W. Hornung ’s Raffles , Maurice LeBlanc ’s Arsène Lupin , Edgar Allan Poe ’s C. Auguste Dupin , Emile Gaboriau ’s M. Lecoq , E.C. Bentley ’s Philip Trent , Anna Katherine Green ’s Ebenezer Gryce , Francis Lynde ’s Calvin “ Scientific ” Sprague , William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer ’s Luther Trant , E.C. Bentley ’s Philip Trent , Arthur Reeve ’s Craig Kennedy , Gaston Leroux ’s Rouletabille , and M. Vidocq .
The comic ledger crossover in 1940 was the first squad crossover specifically intended to be ongoing . In All - Star Comics#3(Winter 1940 - 1941 ) Sheldon Mayer and Gardner Fox , along with artists Everett Hibbard and Sheldon Moldoff , brought together characters from several DC comics : Sandman and Hourman from Adventure Comics , Flash and Hawkman from Flash Comics , Green Lantern and the Atom from All - American Comics , and the Spectre and Dr. Fate from More Fun Comics . These characters formed a squad , the Justice Society of America , the first on-going crossing team in popular civilization . The Justice Society appeared in All - Star Comics until 1951 .
All - Star Comics#3is peculiarly significant in the history of crossovers because it was the undivided dandy transmitter for the concept of the crossing . During World War II , comic Good Book had very high circulation rates , with some merchandising over a million copies per consequence . comic were buy and read by children , teenagers , and adults , and thanks to their statistical distribution via the United States Armed Services during the state of war comics were read by millions of servicemen and woman . While crossover had proliferated before All - Star Comics#3 , significantly more man and women were bring out to the concept of the crossover through All - Star Comics#3and other , similar laughable record book team and crossovers .
All - Star Comics#3was also influential internationally . The Mexican reprints of American comics were popular and help oneself propagate the idea of the crossover . In the fifties film have the fictionalise exploits of real - life luchadors ( masked wrestlers ) such as El Santo became popular . It was inevitable that the writers and directors of the film would show the luchadors teaming up , and in 1961 El Santo and fellow luchador Black Shadow were shown fighting a Haitian zombi spirit master in Benito Alazraki ’s Santo Contra los Zombies ( 1961 ) . Santo Contra los Zombies was the first of the luchador crossover movies , a trend that continues today and which has sport lots of luchadors meeting in over two hundred films .
Wold Newton , Anno Dracula , and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The penultimate in crossovers was not bring out until 1972 , when Philip José Farmer published “ An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke ” ( Esquire , April 1972 ) and Tarzan Alive , a “ life history ” of Tarzan . In Tarzan Alive Farmer suppose that eighteen serviceman and fair sex had been present when a radioactive shooting star landed in Wold Newton , Britain . These eighteen men and women had been irradiated , interpolate their genes so that their descendants were superhuman . Farmer become on to theorise that the members of this “ Wold Newton family ” include Tarzan , Sherlock Holmes , Bulldog Drummond , C. Auguste Dupin , Doc Savage , the Spider , Nero Wolfe , and many more . In the sequel to Tarzan Alive , Doc Savage : His Apocalyptic Life ( 1973 ) , Farmer added a phone number of other fictional heroes and villains to the family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . Farmer ’s idea , which finally became known as the “ Wold Newton Universe , ” is a world in which 12 of fictional bomber and villains co - subsist and are related to each other .
The 1990s and 2000s have bring the ultimate in crossovers . Kim Newman ’s first novel , The Night Mayor ( 1989 ) , fetch together a number of characters from noir film , but his Anno Dracula novels and stories ( 1992 - present ) feature legion lineament from literature and film coexisting and interacting . Egyptian dramatist Hani Mutaweh , in The Last Whisper ( 1999 ) , brought together an array of figures from Egyptian finish and story , from King Farouk to doer Zaki Rostom to Naguib al - Rihani ’s small town tribal chief Kishkish Bey , in a human race in which any important Egyptian person or character can meet and express an opinion about each other . Finally , in the humanity of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill ’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics ( 1999 - present tense ) , as in the world of Anno Dracula , any fictional character can co - be with any other character - which is the ultimate in crossovers .
Jess Nevins is a librarian , pulp magazine fiction historiographer , and funny book annotator . He also writes encyclopedias . you’re able to observe out moreon his blog .
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