Batman and Superman. Alien and Predator. Zatoichi and Yojimbo. The Six-Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan. Hercules and Xena. Iron Man and Captain America. Team-ups have been a part of storytelling for as long as stories have been told, from Enkidu helping Gilgamesh to the coming together of the Avengers.
As writers of licensed fiction, one of the most enjoyable aspects is to put together various combinations of characters that don't always get together. But one thing we rarely get to do is team characters from different milieus. Sure, it happens sometimes—in 1998, Simon & Schuster published a Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men crossover novel, and the comics company IDW has an impressive recent history of mixing and matching some of their licensed universes—but for the most part such pairings are left to the realm of fanfiction.
But what about characters who are in the public domain? The sky's the limit there.
And so we as co-editors decided to get some of our favorite tie-in writers together to see what team-ups of classic characters they could come up with. And holy cow, did they give us some great ones.
Some authors went with some instantly recognizable classics: Kevin J. Anderson pairs Jules Verne's Captain Nemo with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster; David Mack put Shakespeare's Prospero (along with Ariel) together with Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (along with Sancho Panza); and Derek Tyler Attico joins Bram Stoker's Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde, and the folk hero John Henry.
Some pairings are natural, like several from the pulp era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Captain Battle and Blackout are World War II-era comics heroes; Dan Fowler and Stinger Seave are Depression-era adventurers; Ace Harlem and Frimbo are Harlem Renaissance heroes; the Moon Man and the Man in the Black Cloak are mysterious two-fisted crime-fighters; Fantomah and Jane Trent, Science Sleuth, are both impressive women who battle injustice. Dayton Ward, James Reasoner, Maurice Broaddus, James A. Moore, and Debbie Daughetee, respectively, took those on.
Some pairings are less natural, but become so in the hands of our incredibly talented authors: Jane Austen's drawing-room delights of the Bennet family may not seem a natural fit for the vampiric hunting of John Polidori's Lord Ruthven, but Delilah S. Dawson makes the Pride and Prejudice/The Vampyre crossover work; The Brain that Wouldn't Die and Night of the Living Dead are two completely different types of movie horror, but Greg Cox melds them effortlessly; Flaxman Low is an early example of the occult detective, while Mezzanotte is a modern take on nineteenth-century vampires, who are combined with style by Nancy Holder & Alan Philipson; and Scott Sigler chronicles the strangely melded aftermath of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Little Shop of Horrors.
Some authors chose to mix historical personages with literary figures: Diana Dru Botsford puts Ernest Shackleton and Sacajawea together with Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver in a tale of explorers; Rigel Ailur pairs history's sharpshooter Annie Oakley with legendary archer Marian of Locksley; and David McIntee puts Chinese Emperor Taizong together with the mythical Tripitaka.
Some team-ups incorporate gods into their work: Ben H. Rome combines Norse, Egyptian, and Aztec mythologies in his tale of Bastet, Sekhmet, Quetzalcoatl, and Fenrir; Jennifer Brody has Bram Stoker's Abraham Van Helsing going back in time to ancient Greece to battle the legendary Medusa at the behest of Athena; and co-editor Keith R.A. DeCandido joins Yoruba goddess Egungun-oya with H. Rider Haggard's title character from She.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy these terrific tales of two-fisted team-ups!