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Intercompany crossover


In comic books, an intercompany crossover (also called cross-company or company crossover) is a comic or series of comics where characters that are the property of one company meet those owned by another company (for example, DC Comics' Superman meeting Marvel's Spider-Man, or DC's Batman meeting Marvel's Wolverine). These usually occur in "one-shot" issues or miniseries (comics).

Some crossovers are part of canon. Most, however, are outside of the continuity of a character's regular title or series of stories. They can be a joke, a gag, a dream sequence, or even a "what if" scenario (such as DC's Elseworlds).

Marvel/DC crossovers (which are mostly non-canon) include those where the characters live in alternate universes, as well as those where they share the "same" version of Earth. Some fans have posited a separate "Crossover Earth" for these adventures. In the earliest licensed crossovers, the companies seemed to prefer shared world adventures. This was the approach for early intercompany crossovers, including 1976's Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man and 1981's Superman and Spider-Man.

Besides the two Superman/Spider-Man crossovers, a number of other DC/Marvel adventures take place on a "Crossover Earth", but later intercompany crossovers tend to present the DC and Marvel Universes as alternate realities, bridged when common foes make this desirable, as the interest in overall continuity has become a major part of even crossover comic books.

Characters are often licensed or sold from one company to another, as with DC acquiring such characters of Fawcett Comics, Quality Comics, and Charlton Comics as the original Captain Marvel, Plastic Man and Captain Atom. In this way, heroes originally published by different companies can become part of the same fictional universe, and interactions between such characters are no longer considered intercompany crossovers.


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