Crossover Cover: Django/Zorro

Django Freeman teams up with the aging Don Diego de la Vega to battle the self-styled “Archduke of Arizona.” This story takes place after the events of Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, which occurred in 1858–1859. However, the film The Mask of Zorro (which is referenced in Jess Nevins' "A Root That Beareth Gall and Worms" and John Allen Small's "A Fate Cast in Silver") has Don Diego definitively dying in 1842. Therefore, I consider this particular story an AU.

Crossover of the Week

April 1939

GHOST OF THUNDER ISLE

            Angelica Tremaine reflects on recent events and their outcome for her older brother Winston and her ex-fiancé Tommy Bolt. When Angelica is murdered, her old friend Nellie Gray speaks to Officer Reagan and Detective Cardona about the crime. Angelica’s current fiancé, Peter Russell, is the grandson of a man who saved a Mexican girl from a band of murderers who were on the run from the law when he was 18 or 19. The elder Russell married the girl and used the reward money to start his own ranch; Peter was named after him. Angelica’s murder is part of a string of deaths of people connected to Winston Tremaine; another of the victims is James Tripp, whose brother Wiggens Winston knew. The mad Tommy Bolt targeted the Tremaine siblings from a base on Thunder Island, but Winston’s friend Clark came to their rescue. Smitty remembers a physiobiologist from Harvard named Geresten who experimented on lab animals by introducing electrical stimulation to certain gland centers, altering them physically; Bolt used this same process on humans, including Wiggens Tripp, making them animal-like. It is mentioned that actor Bruce Baxter got his start as an extra in films made in Chelsea.

            Short story by John Allen Small in The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible, Nancy Holder and Joe Gentile, eds., Moonstone Books, 2013. This story serves as a sequel to the Doc Savage comic story “The Doom on Thunder Isle” (Doc Savage Magazine #1, Marvel Comics, August 1975; reprinted in DC Showcase Presents Doc Savage, DC Comics, 2011), which is the source of Angelica Tremaine, her brother Winston, Tommy Bolt, Wiggens Tripp, Thunder Island, and Dr. Geresten. Officer Reagan is a member of the family of New York police officers named Reagan featured in the television series Blue Bloods; his nephew is Henry Reagan, a retired police commissioner in the 21^st century. Detective Joe Cardona is from the Shadow novels. Peter Russell is the grandson of Peter Russell and Monja from Small’s story “Rite of Passage” (Days Gone By: Legends and Tales of Sipokni West, Ethan Books, 2007.) Bruce Baxter is from Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong; Small reconciled several different Kong stories in his tour-de-force essay “The Beast” (Glimmerglass: The Creative Writer’s Annual, Volume 1, John Allen Small, ed., 2009.)