Well, one person asked for it, so here it is....
The following appeared in my first book, Heroes and Monsters. If I had to rewrite it today, I'd change a few things--I (quite embarassingly) left out any mention of Kim Newman's work, and the research I've done in the past six months on pulp and series heroes have turned up a few more examples of crossovers which could profitably be mentioned here--but on the whole I'm satisfied with it. I've cut the last paragraph, which attempts to place League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the context of previous types of crossovers, but other than that what you've got here is how the essay appeared.
(I'm not going to go to the bother of italicizing all the titles as they deserve, because that would take more effort than I have time for now. Just take it as given that everything was properly italicized in the original).
(Oh, and if you spot any obvious errors, or things that should have been included but weren't, I'll feel awfully embarassed).
In one respect the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen seems to be a modern concept: characters from stories by Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur �Sax Rohmer� Ward, among others, interact as if they all live in the same world. This kind of crossover, when characters or concepts from two or more discrete texts or series of texts meet, is common today, or not so uncommon as to baffle readers and viewers. Most people understand the idea of Professor Moriarty appearing on a Star Trek holodeck, or Superman and Batman teaming up to stop the Joker and Lex Luthor, or Shaft helping the Jack of Spades. But the concept of the crossover is much older than many people realize. Historically there have been seven major types of crossovers: the fusion of myths; crossovers within one author�s fictional universe; crossovers in which characters from different creators are brought together by another creator; the afterlife or Bangsian fantasy; the use of real people as fictional characters; crossovers in which characters from different creators are brought together as a team; and crossovers in which a fictional world contains characters from numerous authors. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the latter type of crossover, and is in fact the ultimate in crossover concepts.
The first crossover is difficult to determine. One place to begin is the Greek myths, which were a synthesis of legends from Indo-European and local, pre-Hellenic religions. One of these syntheses was the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. The myth, which dates to the ninth or tenth century B.C.E., is about the hero Jason, who sails to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. Jason is accompanied by a band of fifty notable heroes on his ship, the Argo. Many of these heroes, including Castor, Polydeuces, and Hercules, are the subjects of myths of their own. The standard account of the adventures of the Argonauts is the Argonautica (3rd century B.C.E.) of Appolonius of Rhodes, which combines earlier scattered versions of the myth into a connected story. By bringing the heroes of various disparate myths together into one story Appolonius performed one of the first crossovers in popular culture.
This sort of crossover, in which characters from folklore and legend meet in new stories, would be repeated over the centuries in a variety of cultures. In China Judge Bao Zheng (999-1062 C.E.) was, during his lifetime, famous for his rectitude and commitment to justice. Soon after he died he became the subject of folklore, and in the centuries since then has been appropriated into various genres. The Hundred Cases of Judge Bao (c. 1450) is a collection of Judge Bao�s legal dramas. Five Tigers Pacify the West (c. 1500) places Judge Bao with a group of martial artist monks. In Shih Y�-k�un�s Three Heroes and Five Gallants (1879) he is teamed with Zhan Zhao, the �Knight-errant of the South,� and with the Five Rats, five knights of renown.
In the West a similar syncretism of legend and folklore occurred. Around 150 C.E. Lucian of Samosata wrote The True History a satire which features one of the earliest fictional trips into outer space. During the trip Lucian and his companions fly past Cloudcuckooland, the floating fortress of the birds from Aristophanes� The Birds (414 B.C.E.). In the Middle Ages the stories of King Arthur as we currently know them were synthesized by the French author Chr�tien de Troyes out of several pre-existing sources, including Celtic and Welsh stories and various legends of the Holy Grail.
The next significant type of crossover began in 1834, when Honor� de Balzac began linking his novels into a coherent, whole, individual fictional universe. Before that year Balzac�s novels had possessed an internal consistency, but it was only in 1834 that he systematically began making use of recurring characters, with 23 of them appearing in the first edition of Le P�re Goriot (1835). Almost 600 recurring characters appear in the nearly 90 books that make up Balzac�s La Com�die Humaine cycle of novels.
Balzac was the first 19th century author to create an ongoing fictional universe in an organized and ambitious way, but he was far from the last. Alexandre Dumas p�re linked together several of his novels into series as well as into an overarching universe, so that beginning in 1844, with Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers), his historical novels are often tied together by recurring characters. Beginning in 1866 Emile Gaboriau used a large number of recurring characters in his detective novels, many of which involved his series character �Monsieur Lecoq.� Paul F�val, the greatest of the French pulp novelists, linked eight separate novels into his Les Habits Noir cycle, which ran from 1863-1875. Emile Zola did this as well, starting in 1868 with the first of twenty novels about the Second Empire and the Rougon and Macquart families.
The most notable example of this use of linked, reappearing characters occurs in the novels of Jules Verne. Many non-French readers are unaware of the links between his books, thanks in large part to the many bad translations of his work and to a general ignorance of his less famous work, but Verne, like Balzac, Zola and Gaboriau before him, set many of his works, famous and less so, in the same universe:
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864) refers to Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); Journey to the Center of the Earth refers to both Captain Hatteras and to Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1869) refers to Hector Servadac and Journey to the Center of the Earth; The Mysterious Island (1870), the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, refers to Captain Grant's Children (1867), Five Weeks In A Balloon, Captain Hatteras, and Around the Moon (1870); The Far Country (1873) refers to Captain Hatteras; Hector Servadac (1877) and Black Indies (1877) refer to each other; The Clipper of the Clouds (1886) refers to The Begum's Fortune (1879) and to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea; Topsy Turvy (1889), a sequel to From The Earth To the Moon (1865), refers to The Robinsons' School (1882), Captain Hatteras, and Hector Servadac; and The Ice Sphinx (1897), Verne's sequel to Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, refers to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
By the late 19th century an increasing number of authors were writing more than one series with recurring characters. Crossovers in which an author had two of his or her series characters meet grew more common in both high and popular culture. A number of these types of crossovers appeared in dime novels. Albert Aiken was the author of the Joe Phenix stories in Saturday Journal and Banner Weekly and the Dick Talbot stories in Beadle�s New York Dime Library. Aiken brought the pair together in Beadle�s New York Dime Library #419 (1886) in a story in which the detective Phenix pursues the highwayman Talbot but fails to arrest him. Luis Senarens was the author of the Frank Reade stories in Boys of New York and Frank Reade Library and the author of the Jack Wright stories in Boys� Star Library, Boys of New York, and Happy Days. Senarens had the two race around the world for a $10,000 prize in Boys� Star Library #375 (1896). This type of crossover continued during the years of the pulps and the story papers, with the authors of the Sexton Blake stories creating a dozen separate characters and then bringing them into the Blake series.
The first truly modern crossover, in which characters from different creators are brought together in a story by another creator, was created in 1849, when Mary Cowden Clarke published Kit Bam�s Adventures; or, The Yarns of an Old Mariner. The novel is about Kit Bam, a retired sailor, who tells a brother and sister about his adventures. Bam�s shipmates are �Will Wavelance� (Shakespeare), �Geoffrey Tabard� (Chaucer), �Edmund Faery� (Spenser), �John Paul� (Johann Paul Richter), and �Percy Shelton� (Shelley). In his wanderings Bam encounters M�ala from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre�s Paul et Virginie (1794), the falcon from William Painter�s Palace of Pleasure (1566-1575), the barber, winged boy, and brass horse from The Arabian Nights, the key and the rainbow from Johann Paul Richter�s Himmelsschl�ssel (1796), Sir Lionel from Arthurian myth, the Anthropophagi from Shakespeare�s Othello (1604), the nymph Galatea from Greek myth, Prospero�s Island from Shakespeare�s The Tempest (1612), the Monster from Mary Shelley�s Frankenstein (1818), and the Ancient Mariner from Samuel Taylor Coleridge�s �The Rime of the Ancient Mariner� (1798).
The idea of a character meeting other creators� characters while traveling was used by several authors in the 19th and early 20th century. In 1872 Henry Lee Boyle, using the pseudonym �Theopholis M�Crib, B.A.� published Kennaquhair. A Narrative of Utopian Travel. Kennaquhair (a Scots words meaning �an imaginary place�), is a Utopian city in which various fictional characters live. (They die only when they are forgotten by the outside world). The narrator is escorted through Kennaquhair by Yorick from Shakespeare�s Hamlet (1600) and meets a number of fictional characters, including Mrs. Sairey Gamp from Charles Dickens� Martin Chuzzlewit (1842-1844). Another author to use traveling as the vehicle for a crossover was Walter de la Mare, who in 1904 published the novel Henry Brocken, in which the titular character goes wandering, possibly through daydreams, and meets a number of different fictional characters, including Bottom and Titania, from Shakespeare�s A Midsummer Night�s Dream (1600), Jane Eyre and Rochester from Charlotte Bront��s Jane Eyre (1847), Rosinante and Don Quixote from Cervantes� Don Quixote (1605-1615), and Annabel Lee from Edgar Allan Poe�s �Annabel Lee� (1849). Brocken also travels through the community of Sleeping Beauty and meets the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift�s Gulliver�s Travels (1726).
The next major crossover is the afterlife or Bangsian fantasy. The afterlife has been used for centuries as a meeting ground for characters from different creators. One early example is Virgil�s Aeneid (c. 29-19 B.C.E.), in which Aeneas sees a number of heroes and heroines from earlier Greek epics, including Phaedra, Pasiphae, and Deiphobus. In 1895 John Kendrick Bangs began a new vogue in afterlife fantasies when he published The Houseboat on the River Styx. Houseboat was the book that spawned the phrase �Bangsian fantasy,� or a fantasy of the afterlife in which the ghosts of famous men and women come together and have various (usually genial) adventures. In Houseboat most of the ghosts are of real people, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and George Washington, but the ghosts of Hamlet, Yorick, Adam, Shem, Noah, and Ophelia also appear. In 1897 Bangs published a sequel, The Pursuit of the Houseboat, which took the concept further, bringing together the ghosts of fictional characters who were known or thought to be dead: Sherlock Holmes (Holmes had �died� in A. Conan Doyle�s �The Final Problem,� 1893), Shylock (William Shakespeare�s The Merchant of Venice, 1600), Lecoq (from Emile Gaboriau�s work), Hawkshaw (from Tom Taylor�s The Ticket-of-leave Man, 1863), and Old Sleuth (from Harlan P. Halsey�s dime novels).
Sherlock Holmes� appearance in The Pursuit of the Houseboat was his first appearance after his�death� in �The Adventure of the Final Problem� in 1893, and the first use of Holmes by a writer other than A. Conan Doyle. In 1897 Holmes was referred to as deceased in Guy Boothby�s �The Duchess of Wiltshire�s Diamonds.� But far more common were parodies of Holmes, who has appeared more than any other single character in pastiches (works done in the style of another writer) and crossovers. The first pastiche of Holmes was R.C. Lehmann�s �Picklock Holes,� who appeared in a series of stories in Punch in 1893. The first crossover involving Holmes and another series character is in Maurice LeBlanc�s �Ars�ne Lupin� story, �Sherlock Holmes Arrive Trop Tard� in Je Sais Tout #17 (15 June 1906). (After pressure from A. Conan Doyle�s lawyers the title of the story was changed to �Herlock Sholmes Arrive Trop Tard�). Following LeBlanc�s story Holmes was often used in crossovers, either through characters like August Derleth�s �Solar Pons� and Arthur Porges� �Stately Homes� or through the illegal (that is, not authorized by Doyle) use of Holmes himself. In 1908, in the first issue of the anonymously written Miss Boston, la seule d�tective-femme du monde entier (Miss Boston, the only female detective in the entire world), Miss Boston is inspired to fight crime by the murder of Holmes, which she solves, thus beginning her own career as a detective. Holmes was not the only character to be illegally appropriated and used in crossovers in this way. A 1909 Italian version of Miss Boston�s adventures changed Holmes to Nick Carter as the respected elder detective whose murder was Miss Boston�s first case.
Crossovers involving the use of fictionalized versions of real people became common in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. Celebrities have often been used by authors in their stories, but before the growth of the news media in the 19th century these men and women were the products of folklore rather than reality. Dick Turpin appeared in William Ainsworth�s Gothic novel Rookwood (1834) and in penny dreadfuls, but the Turpin used in those works was a heavily romanticized version which bore little relation to the real Dick Turpin. The growth of the newspaper in the 19th century allowed individuals other than heads of state to become internationally known, and allowed them to be used by authors as supporting characters in serial fiction. Thomas Byrnes (1842-1910) was appointed Detective Bureau Chief of the New York City Police Department in 1880, and over the next fifteen years Byrnes turned the N.Y.P.D. into a modern, professional police force, one widely admired for its efficiency. Byrnes became a celebrity during these years and was seen as the personification of modern policing. He was incorporated into at least eight different dime novel detective serials in the 1890s as �Superintendent Byrnes� or �Inspector Byrnes,� the �Head of the New York City Police Department� and the man responsible for giving Nick Carter or Broadway Billy or Dave Dotson or Gideon Gault their orders. Theodore Roosevelt, during the years of his presidency, was almost as popular a subject for appearances in the dime novels, as was the internationally renowned strongman Eugen Sandow (1867-1925). A fictionalized version of the Russian terrorist Evno Azef (1869-1918) fought the mystic S�r Dubnotal in the French pulp S�r Dubnotal and Sexton Blake in the British story paper Union Jack, both in 1909. A fictionalized version of the Japanese spy Oka-Yuma appeared as the enemy of Nat Pinkerton in the German heldroman (dime novel) Nat Pinkerton, der K�nig der Detectivs in 1910, as the villainous lead in a serial, �Oka-Yuma, Japanese Spy� in a Russian newspaper in 1911-1912, and as the enemy of Lukas Hull in the German heldroman Lukas Hull, Detektiv Abenteuer in 1921.
Crossovers in French, German, and Russian newspapers and dime novels were more common than exceptional in the 1910s and 1920s. The spread of American and British popular literature through Europe and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th century led to European and Asian authors imitating American and British authors and writing crossovers of their own. In 1921 the Chinese writer Cheng Xiaoqing began a series of crossovers between his character Huo Sang and Lu Ping, a series character created and written by Sun Liaohong. The joke of the crossovers is that Huo Sang began life as a Sherlock Holmes copy and was deliberately written and billed as �the Oriental Sherlock Holmes,� while Sun Liaohong had created Lu Ping in imitation of Maurice LeBlanc�s Ars�ne Lupin (the similarity in names is deliberate). The first duel between Huo Sang and Lu Ping was an homage to LeBlanc�s first Holmes-Lupin crossover, �Herlock Sholmes Arrive Trop Tard,� and like LeBlanc�s story the Huo Sang-Lu Ping duel took on a life of its own and was repeated in several different stories. In 1922 the Malaysian writer Muhammad bin Muhammad Said wrote the first Malaysian detective novel, Cheritera Kechurian Lima Million Ringgit (Tale of the Theft of Five Million Dollars), a crossover in which the gentleman thief Lord Lister (who was created in Germany but who like Holmes was the subject of unauthorized worldwide usage) clashed with Nick Carter.
The trend continued in the 1930s, with crossovers becoming more common in European newspapers and dime novels than in American pulps and British story papers. One notable pulp crossover was the meeting between Emile Tepperman's Red Falcon and Robert J. Hogan's G-8 in Dare-Devil Aces (January 1935). But far more crossovers took place in the 1930s in the German heldromans, when numerous crossovers and team-ups between series characters were written before 1939 when the Nazi Party placed restrictions on the publishers and authors of the heldromans. A few examples include: Walther Kabel�s Olaf Karl Abelsen traveling into the underworld of Jules Verne�s Journey to the Center of the Earth; Captain Mors appearing alongside Frank Allan, Willi Sachse�s Alaska Jim, Hans Reinhard�s J�rn Farrow, The Four Musketeers, and Hans Stark in their respective heldromans; Hans Reinhard�s J�rn Farrow teaming up with Captain Mors and discovering that his father had encountered Reinhard�s Rolf Torring; and Rolf Torring encountering J�rn Farrow�s father and the descendant of Captain Axel Holm.
The next significant type of crossover, in which characters from different creators are brought together as a team, appeared in a comic book in 1940 rather than in a book or pulp magazine. By 1940 the idea of a crossover featuring a team of characters from different creators was well known. The Argonauts were such a team, as was the group of detectives in Pursuit of the Houseboat. More recently, Carolyn Wells had created such a team in 1915 and 1916 in the three �Society of Infallible Detectives� stories. Presided over by Sherlock Holmes, the Society meet to solve crimes. Their membership is Jacques Futrelle�s S.S. �The Thinking Machine� Van Dusen, E.W. Hornung�s Raffles, Maurice LeBlanc�s Ars�ne 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. And in 1928 Ralph Smith wrote �Frank Merriwell vs. Fred Fearnot� in the The Frank Reade Library, in which two teams of characters are formed. The story is about the wedding of Harvey Shackleton�s character Fred Fearnot to his sweetheart Evelyn Olcott, and the baseball game in which Gilbert Patten and Burt Standish�s Frank Merriwell pitches to Harvey Shackleford�s Fred Fearnot. Many of the guests at the wedding and members of the opposing baseball teams had been lead characters in their own dime novels in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Frank and Dick Merriwell, George Marsh�s Dick "the Millionaire Detective" Dobbs, sports promoter Tex Rickard, Francis W. Doughty�s Old and Young King Brady, Ned Taylor�s Ted Strong and his Rough Riders, S.A.D. Cox�s The Three Chums, Old Joe Crowfoot, Cap'n Wiley, Bowery Billy, Frank Forrest�s Dick Daresome, and Chickering Carter. Nick Carter and Luis Senarens� Frank Reade, Jr. are mentioned as having been invited but unable to attend due to active cases, and Francis W. Doughty�s Young Klondike, Klondike Kit, Old Broadbrim and W.I. James� Old Cap Collier are referred to as having died in action before the wedding. Most of these characters were perennials, with some, like the Merriwells, appearing in stories for over thirty years.
The comic book crossover in 1940 was the first team 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 team, the Justice Society of America, the first ongoing crossover team in popular culture. The Justice Society appeared in All-Star Comics until 1951.
All-Star Comics #3 is particularly significant in the history of crossovers because it was the single greatest vector for the concept of the crossover. During World War Two comic books had very high circulation rates, with some, like Superman, Batman, and Captain America, selling over a million copies per issue, hundreds of thousands more than Time and Life. Comics were bought and read by children, teenagers, and adults, and thanks to their distribution via the United States Armed Services during the war comics were read by millions of servicemen and women. While crossovers had proliferated before All-Star Comics #3, significantly more men and women were exposed to the concept of the crossover through All-Star Comics #3 and other, similar comic book teams and crossovers.
The penultimate in crossovers was not published until 1972, when Philip Jos� Farmer published �An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke� (Esquire, April 1972) and Tarzan Alive, a �biography� of Tarzan. In the book Farmer theorized that eighteen men and women had been present when a radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, Britain. These eighteen men and women had been irradiated, altering their genes so that their descendants were supermen and women. Farmer went on to theorize that the members of this �Wold Newton family� included 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 number of other fictional heroes and villains to the family tree. Farmer�s idea, which eventually became known as the �Wold Newton Universe,� is a world in which dozens of fictional heroes and villains co-exist and are related to each other.
(This shouldn't be necessary, but just in case: this entry is � copyright 2003 Jess Nevins. It may not be duplicated in part or in whole without my permission except under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law).
Posted by Jess Nevins at October 12, 2005 2:45 PM