Crossover of the Week

Winter 1940; Summer 2011

A PLAGUE ON THE LAND

Moran’s Pub, owned by Seamus Moran, is frequented by vigilantes. Seamus pours the owner of a fire opal another large Bushmill’s, and thinks of his cousin Paddy and his bar uptown. Seamus thinks most of the vigilantes are killers, with two exceptions: “the green one was a man of peace, the pink one killed when she had to but mostly avoided it.” Seamus, a leprechaun, asks the Nightmare to deal with trouble in his homeland, Eire, the spiritual plane of Ireland. In the 21st century, Detective Sergeant Bianca Jones of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide division talks to Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, at Paddy’s. Bianca thinks the Nightmare is “a character, like the Spider or the Pink Reaper,” but Nemesis says he was real, and persuades Bianca to go back into the past to help the hero in Eire.

Short story by John L. French in Apocalypse 13, Diane Raetz, ed., Padwolf Publishing, 2012. The vigilante with the fire opal is the shadowy hero of the pulps. Paddy Moran and Nemesis are from Patrick Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series. “The green one” is the Green Lama, while “the pink one” is the Pink Reaper, another character from the Murphy’s Lore series. The Nightmare is a pulp-era vigilante created by French. The Nightmare became romantically involved with Nemesis in Thomas and French’s book From the Shadows. Bianca Jones appears in her own series of stories by French. Bianca is wrong about the Nightmare and the Pink Reaper being fictional, and she is also wrong about the Spider’s nonexistence.

Crossover of the Week

Apologies for the lack of posts since Monday. I was in New York City from Tuesday until a few hours ago. :)

1939
THE UNDEAD KILLER
The Nightmare battles the Dead Man, a zombie sent back in time from the future, who is now acting as an enforcer for gangster Wolf Hopkins. A mugger tells the Nightmare about a conversation he overheard among a group of hoods at the Black Ship. The Nightmare thinks maybe Kent can give him some pointers on phrases to use to intimidate criminals. Later, in his alter ego of Michael Shaw, the hero is approached by Lieutenant Jerome Easton at the pub Moran’s. Easton refers to “gentlemen’s clubs, like that one the Commissioner belongs to, what’s it called? The Baltic Club?” Shaw replies, “Something like that.” Contemplating the best course of action in confronting Hopkins, Shaw thinks, “Richard would charge in with guns a-blazing, taking down his quarry, but only after leveling half the city in doing so. Kent would already know where Hopkins’ headquarters was. He would stealthily infiltrate it and find the clue that would lead him straight to the Dead Man. He’d go there straightaway, always assuming he didn’t have to rescue an agent or two first.” Considering whether he should recruit agents of his own, or an attractive female companion, he thinks, “Who am I kidding? If I had a girl like Nina or Carol, I’d marry her at once, and the Nightmare would be a memory. Sometimes we can be such damn fools.”
Short story by John L. French in Zombies in Time and Space, Ron Hanna, ed., Wild Cat Books, 2010. Kent is the alter ego of a certain shadowy pulp hero; the Black Ship, the Commissioner, and the club to which he belongs are from the same series. Moran’s is owned by Seamus Moran, whose cousin Paddy Moran runs the bar Bulfinche’s in Patrick Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series. Richard is Richard Wentworth, better known as the Spider. “Nina” may be a typo, and meant to refer to Wentworth’s beloved, Nita Van Sloan. Alternatively, it could be a reference to Nina Ferrera, niece and former assistant of Harold Ward’s pulp villain Doctor Death, and the girlfriend of Death’s foe Jimmy Holm. Carol is Carol Baldwin, girlfriend of Tony Quinn, alias the Black Bat. The central premise of Zombies in Time and Space is in the far future, the Zombie Institute of Time and Space was created, which sends the undead back in time because physically traveling through time is impossible for living beings. Since there are numerous instances of recorded time travel by living beings in the Crossover Universe, the Institute likely exists in the future of an alternate reality, and the Dead Man was sent to the 1930s of the CU rather than his native reality. This raises the possibility the other time periods in which the zombies found themselves were also alternate realities, both to their own universe and to the CU.

Crossover Cover: Cthulhu Unbound Volume 2

This Cthulhu Mythos anthology includes four stories with crossovers. In Douglas P. Wojtowicz's "The Hunters within the Corners," the masked vigilante Skaramine battles August Shorer, the last of Keziah Mason’s students and coven. Skaramine was mentored by an old man named Kent, who gave him his twin Colt .45s, and taught him how to heal his own wounds, change his appearance, blend into the shadows, and throw his laugh. Kent is said to have been "a shadow hunting shadows" in another era. Kent is Kent Allard, aka the Shadow. In Patrick Thomas' "Surely You Joust," Sir Dagonet, jester and Knight of the Round Table, and the mage Ganieda (Gani for short), Merlin’s twin sister, journey to the kingdom of Lyonese to recruit a knight of its court to join the knights of Camelot, but wind up nearly being sacrificed to Father Dagon. Sir Dagonet (aka the Infinite Jester) appears in Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series and its spinoffs, which have already been incorporated into the CU, as you can see by clicking on  the Murphy's Lore label. In Mark Zirbel's "Santiago Contra el Culto de Cthulhu," the masked Mexican wrestler Santiago battles Cthulhu. Talking about the villains he encounters a regular basis, Santiago says, "One week, the great-great-great-grandson of Doctor Frankenstein is trying to steal my brain to turn his monster into the World Heavyweight Champion, the next week, some voodoo priestess wants to eat my heart in order to gain control of a legion of masked wrestler zombies." Santiago’s match with Cthulhu is rather tongue-in-cheek; he immediately defeats the Great Old One by punching him in the testicles. Therefore, it seems safe to say this story takes place in an AU. In "Nemo at R'lyeh" by crossover-loving author Joshua Reynolds, Captain Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus explore the resurfaced island of R’lyeh, and narrowly avoid an encounter with the dreaded Cthulhu himself. Robur is also mentioned.