Crossover Covers: The Lone Ranger/Green Hornet: Champions of Justice

 

In June 1938, Britt Reid becomes the Green Hornet and fights a new incarnation of the Cavendish gang with the aid of his great-uncle John, who comes out of retirement to don the mask of the Lone Ranger once more. John gets a ride from a cab driver, who is meant to be one of the shadowy vigilante’s agents. In a flashback, a Sergeant of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appears; this is meant to be Sergeant Frank Preston from the radio series Challenge of Yukon. John and the Sergeant discover they are related through their mutual ancestors, the Waynes. In other words, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, and Sergeant Preston are all related to Batman. In another flashback to 1896, John Reid gives a nine-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt one of his trademark silver bullets, an event first mentioned in the miniseries The Shadow/Green Hornet: Dark Nights, also written by Michael Uslan. The Ranger gets some help from a police officer named Kip. Officer Kip Burland will later become the masked crimefighter known as the Black Hood, whose exploits will be published by MLJ, later known as Archie Comics. Mourners at John Reid’s funeral include the shadowy pulp hero, Daddy Warbucks, a certain golden-eyed doctor, the Spirit, Mandrake the Magician, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon, Bruce Wayne, and Clark Kent. In this story, Dan Reid, Jr. dies before his son Britt becomes the Green Hornet, whereas he was still alive in the original radio series. The Hornet is based in Chicago, but in the CU he operated in Detroit. The Shadow/Green Hornet has already been designated an AU. The Lone Ranger's death conflicts with Jim Harmon’s “Tom Mix and the Mystery of the Bodiless Horseman.”  Therefore, this series must be an AU.

This crossover is one of over a thousand covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, coming this summer from Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!