On writing DC vs. Marvel

Originally published May 25, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1436

The phone rang on my desk in the direct sales department at Marvel Comics. I’d been working there less than a week, but I’d quickly learned that whenever the switchboard got a phone call that they didn’t know what to do with, and they didn’t want to bother editorial with it, they invariably kicked it over to direct sales. More specifically, since I was the new guy, they kicked it over to me. “Direct sales,” I answered.

A kid’s voice on the other end said, with no preamble, “I was wondering, if Superman raced the Silver Surfer, who would win?”

“The Silver Surfer,” I said without hesitation.

“Okay, thanks,” he said, and hung up.

Of course I said the Surfer. I worked at Marvel. If I’d been working at DC, I would’ve said Superman. What else would you expect?

There’s a story—perhaps true, perhaps not—that Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson were in the midst of filming the climactic, major Batman/Joker confrontation in the first Batman film. As the anecdote goes, up there in the bell tower, Batman had just grabbed the Joker by the front of his shirt and drawn him in close, almost nose to nose. But instead of saying their dialogue, the actors were suddenly struck by the sheer ludicrousness of the situation: A guy in a rubber bat suit and make-up rings around his eyes, going mano a mano with another guy wearing clown white-face, a prosthetic smile, and a purple suit that would give Mr. Blackwell cerebral hemorrhage. Whereupon Keaton is alleged to have said, “My God…we’re grown men!” and the two actors dissolved into helpless peals of laughter. As one might surmise, the take was not used in the final print.

To a certain degree, I think that’s how Mark Gruenwald, Mike Carlin, Ron Marz and I felt when we were working on the megacompany crossover event, DC vs. Marvel, back in 1995. There was a giddy sense of We’re grown men! We couldn’t believe that we were actually being paid serious, grown-up money to actualize the kind of fanboy fantasies we’d been engaging in since our earliest comic book reading days.

This isn’t intended to take anything away from the achievement that was Superman vs. Spider-Man. That tabloid-sized publication was one of the comics that brought me back into the comic-reading fold after a lengthy absence. How could I pass it up, after all? The first meeting between a Marvel and a DC character: How cool was that?

The thing was, as a kid I never wondered about Superman slugging it out with Spider-Man for the simple reason that any kid will tell you that Superman could break Spidey in half. No, the tendency was to pair like-to-like. My sketchbook from when I was 12 years old has impressively bad drawings in which I have the Flash battling Quicksilver, Aquaman fighting Sub-Mariner, Captain America deflecting a batarang with his shield. So imagine what it was like for me when Mark Gruenwald called me up and asked me if I wanted to participate in what was intended to be the ultimate fan boy kind of dream that they won’t let me say in a family publication.

I’ve never given so little thought to an offer in my life. At the time I had a major workload I was dealing with, and I had sworn to myself that I wasn’t taking on any other projects. But my God, how could I pass it up? The thinking behind the team-up was that they wanted two writers who had chops with both companies, and Ron and I were apparently on the short list of writers with that criteria. I snapped it up in a heartbeat, with a sense that I was going to be contributing to history.

To me, another of the big attractions was the reteaming of Gruenwald and Carlin. The Grueny/Carlin office was the happening place back in the day. Any truly demented scheme, any nutso activity that wound up affecting the entire Bullpen, usually had its origins in the demented recesses of that particular lair. So the thought of seeing them hatching the ultimate crossover, of being a part of it, was absolutely irresistible.

The basics of DC vs. Marvel came out of a marathon plotting session which started in Gruenwald’s Manhattan apartment, migrated to a nearby restaurant, and back to his place. We were all extremely aware of the weight of fan expectations upon us. On the one hand we wanted to do everything we could to play to them; on the other, we also wanted to confound them, to pull rabbits out of our hats that no one would see coming. That was the concept behind the Amalgam books: Grueny and Carlin figured, correctly, that fans would be so focused on the long-awaited battles, that they would be utterly blindsided by the unexpected development at the end of issue #3. I had dibs on writing an Amalgam title if I so desired, but I passed on it, feeling overwhelmed enough time-wise by my involvement with the main series. Besides, the only Amalgam character I’d ever want to write is Snapper Jones, Sidekick-For-Hire.

The first thing we did was produce a lengthy list of confrontations we wanted to see. This was the aspect that catapulted us most squarely into the fan wish-list mentality. Our collective inner children were bouncing around Gruenwald’s living room, coming up with every team-up and battle scenario we could muster. Some of them wouldn’t make the cut at all, others would take no more than a panel, others a page or two. Some of the bouts would constitute what we called the “Undercards” or “Prelims.” These were the superhero slugouts that the fans wouldn’t be voting on, the ones that we controlled the outcomes for. Why did we do it that way? One word: Politics. We had no idea how the fan voting would turn out on the major confrontations, but we were keenly aware of the fact that neither company wanted to be utterly humiliated. So we arranged the undercard battles to be fairly even-Steven in terms of which company’s heroes won. That way, even if the fan voting went utterly down one company line or the other, at least both sides would have some measure of dignity in the outcome because of the preliminary bouts.

Anyone who’s ever been in a plotting session such as this will tell you that ideas get thrown about fast and furious, modified, restructured, etc. But in terms of specifics, this is what I recall:

I think I came up with the basic notion of two warring cosmic entities as the impetus for the confrontation. The reason I believe those were mine was because I essentially cribbed them both from book three of the Photon series which I’d written some years before (loosely basing the concept on Zoroastrianism) and which I was reasonably certain—based on the royalty statements—that no one had read. I know for sure I came up with the sky-is-bleeding visual, also taken from the Photon book. Remember, kids, if you’re going to steal, steal from yourself or from ancient religions.

I’m pretty sure Carlin came up with the inspired gag of pitting Superman against the legions of the Mole Man. It was a brilliant homage to the original movie short, Superman and the Mole Men, the 1951 flick that featured the debut of George Reeves as Superman. The original was gloriously cheesy and is especially memorable for the sequence where the subterranean creatures open fire on the Man of Steel with a huge ray gun, unintentionally hilarious since it looked suspiciously like a tricked-up vacuum cleaner. We recreated the scene for issue 4, right down to the vacuum cleaner gun lovingly reproduced by Dan Jurgens and Joe Rubinstein.

I definitely know I came up with the idea that a battle could be won by simply “immobilizing” one’s opponent… the equivalent of winning a wrestling match by pinning the other guy for a few seconds. That way we didn’t necessarily have to end each fight by having one hero pummeled into unconsciousness; it also meant that a weaker opponent could theoretically defeat a stronger one if he was crafty enough and/or lucky enough.

The defeat of Sub-Mariner at the hands (well, hand) of Aquaman caused some fan controversy. Mea culpa. When working out the undercards, I issued a plea: I said, “Look, guys, I’m busy trying to earn Aquaman respect in his ongoing series, and he’s got an ongoing title while Namor doesn’t right now. I need to have Aquaman win this bout.” Gruenwald and Carlin said, “How the hëll can Aquaman reasonably defeat Namor, who’s clearly so much stronger?” “I don’t know… maybe he can drop a whale on him or something,” I said. Which is what wound up happening.

We didn’t do Thanos vs. Darkseid the way I wanted. My notion was to have Thanos and Darkseid confront each other, simply say, “So,” to each other, and stand there, staring. This would start toward the beginning of issue #1. Every so often we’d cut back to them, still standing, still staring. And toward the end of issue #4, without a word, Thanos would fall over. End of battle. My notion was that they were battling on a plane of reality/existence that we couldn’t even begin to conceive. But it wasn’t visual enough, didn’t jibe with the plot, and we didn’t have room for it anyway. But it would have been cool.

The other mandate we had from Gruenwald and Carlin was that, however the thing was resolved, Batman and Captain America had to be the key players in making that happen. The concept was that, in the midst of all the universe-shaking cosmic proportions of the story, it was the actions of the two most mortal of heroes which would serve to settle the dispute between the cosmic entities (who really evolved into metaphors for Marvel and DC, or even Carlin and Gruenwald themselves.)

The initial thought was that Ron and I would tag-team the writing: He’d write 8 pages, then I’d write the next, and so on. After the initial brainstorming session, we tried mapping a detailed outline for the first issue in that manner, and it totally tanked. Bottom line, our styles were too different. Mike and Mark felt the story didn’t flow, and they were right. So Ron and I decided we would simply each write two issues entirely (with input from the other as needed), making each one of a piece. To Ron’s utter astonishment, I volunteered to take issues 2 and 4. As far as he was concerned, 1 and 3 were the issues, because #1 was… well… #1. The historic first encounters. The most hyped, the one everyone was waiting for. And issue #3 was going to have all the “big” bouts. In terms of pure attention and fan anticipation, 1 and 3 were the must-have issues, and I was willingly handing them off.

Me, I saw them as laden with creative pitfalls. The premiere issue had to be largely thirty-two pages of exposition and confused heroes running around saying, “Who the hëll are you?” As for the much-heralded issue #3… I gladly gave it a pass. First off, there was going to be lots of extra work, because all the main bouts had to be plotted and scripted twice, so that the voted-upon ending could be dropped into place. Second, I didn’t feel I could do creative justice to mega-bouts like Superman vs. Hulk in three pages. And third, I hated the notion of having the outcome bound by fan preferences (for instance: I’m sorry, kids, but Lobo can tussle with Superman for an entire book, demolish ten square miles of buildings, and not break sweat. Fine, Wolverine is the best he is at what he does, but what he doesn’t do is beat Lobo… not in three pages, not in thirty three.) And besides, the “big, big” match-ups were not the duos from my childhood. Storm, Wolverine, Lobo, and Superboy (as such) weren’t around when I was a kid, nor in my youth was I a fan of Captain America or the Hulk (ironic, all things considered.)

But Namor vs. Aquaman, Quicksilver vs. Flash… as noted above, those were the match-ups I’d always wanted to see, even as a kid. So the temptation to do the “official” versions was irresistible, and they were going to be in #2 (plus for some fights I would have as many as six pages to play with: A positively leisurely pace compared to three pages.) And issue #4 appealed to me as a creative challenge because somehow, in some still-undetermined way, that issue had to tie everything together into a satisfying conclusion.

So Ron and I worked out that rarest of compromises: One in which both participants felt they got the better end of the deal. And Ron certainly did as good a job with the inherent pitfalls of the two issues I steered clear of.

How was fan reaction when the series finally hit? Mixed, as is always going to happen with any such project. Many fans both crabbed about it and also complained it wasn’t long enough, which reminded me of the old joke about two Jewish women, Sadie and Ethel, who run into each other in a hotel in the Catskills. Sadie says, “So, nu, Ethel? What do you think of the food here?” Ethel says, “Oy! The food is terrible!” Sadie replies, “You’re right, the food’s terrible! And such small portions!”

As for me, DC vs. Marvel was easily the most exciting project I ever had the opportunity to work. There’s been a handful of times that I’ve lived the dreams of my youthful comic reading days. Getting Jerry Siegel’s autograph at San Diego. Writing a Spider-Man story penciled by John Buscema and inked by John Romita, Sr. But DC vs. Marvel was definitely a pinnacle in that regard, and I’ll always be grateful to Mark and Mike for making me part of it.

That’s it. Sorry. No sarcastic or smart-alecky conclusion. I had a blast. Period.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)