Crossover of the Week

Summer 1903

A PIRATE’S LIFE 

Dr. Eric Palmer is brought before Captain Nemo and Robur, who need his help to investigate a murder at the Pirate’s Conference they are hosting, which is held every fifty years, and whose attendees include sea and air pirates. James Gunn and Archibald Haddock escort Palmer to the scene of the crime. The dead man is the Dread Pirate Roberts, who is supposedly over three-hundred-years-old, but part of a succession of men who have used that identity. Others attending the conference include the German Captain Mors and members of the Singh Brotherhood. Palmer asks Gunn about pirate dynasties, and the latter names the Turners and Sala’s band of women. Gunn introduces Palmer to the Nautilus’ first mate, Mister Ishmael. Captain James Hook asks Palmer about his progress on the case. The alleged Dread Pirate Roberts was really Manfred von Warteck, whose family aspires to rival the great criminal brotherhoods of Europe, such as the Black Coats. 

Short story by Travis Hiltz in Tales of the Shadowmen Volume 16: Voir Dire, Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2020; reprinted in French in Les Compagnons de l’Ombre (Tome 27), Jean-Marc Lofficier, ed., Rivière Blanche, 2020. Dr. Eric Palmer is from Paul Féval, fils’ novel Felifax, the Tiger-Man. Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus, are from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. Robur is from Verne’s Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World. James Gunn is a descendant of Ben Gunn from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Archibald Haddock is from Hergé’s comic The Adventures of Tintin. The Dread Pirate Roberts is from William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Captain Mors is a German pulp hero. The Singh Brotherhood and Sala’s group, the Sky Band, are from Lee Falk’s comic strip The Phantom. The Turners are from the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. Ishmael is from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen portrayed Ishmael as the Nautilus’ first mate. Captain James Hook is from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Manfred von Warteck is related to Baron Glô von Warteck, the villain of Jean de La Hire’s The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer. The Black Coats are from a series of novels by Paul Féval. 

This crossover writeup is one of hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Covers: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

Are you a fan of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? 

Then you may enjoy this final chapter of the series, picking up directly after the events of Volume 3: Century!

For a fuller write-up of this comic, check out the appendix on alternate universes in my forthcoming book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3! As with the first two volumes, this book is an AUTHORIZED companion to Win Scott Eckert's invaluable tomes Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2 and will be published by the awesome folks at Meteor House!

Crossover Covers: Nemo

This trilogy of graphic novels features a decades long feud between Janni Dakkar (aka Janni Nemo), Captain Nemo's daughter and heir, and the immortal queen Ayesha from H. Rider Haggard's She. Janni inherited her father's mantle in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III: Century: 1910. I have already concluded that Century does not fit into CU continuity, and the Nemo novels do not fit either, as will be shown below. In Nemo: Heart of Ice, Janni follows the trail of her father’s Antarctic expedition from decades ago after plundering Ayesha's treasures. Ayesha’s current patron, newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (from Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane) dispatches aging inventors Frank Reade Jr. and Jack Wright and their younger colleague “Tom Swyfte” to retrieve the Queen’s belongings and deal with Janni and her crew. Tom Swift is portrayed in an unflattering manner, making racist comments about Janni and shooting Reade in the leg with his Electric Rifle in order to slow down a raging shoggoth, effectively leaving the elder inventor to die. Swift is also seemingly driven irrevocably insane by the encounter with the shoggoth, which does not fit with his appearances in the Tom Swift Jr. novels in the 1950s-1970s. In Nemo: The Roses of Berlin, set in 1941, Janni and her husband Broad Arrow Jack must rescue their daughter Hira and son-in-law Armand Robur (son of Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror) from captivity in Nazi Germany, which is under the power of Ayesha’s current benefactor, Adenoid Hynkel (from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dicator). In the process, they battle the remains of Germany’s equivalent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Die Zwielichthelden (“The Twilight Heroes”.) The Berlin of 1941 in this graphic novel is based on the titular futuristic city from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. Finally, in Nemo: River of Ghosts, Janni, dying and experiencing hallucinations of the ghosts of those she’s lost over the years, deals with Ayesha once and for all in South America in 1975. Janni hires the superhumanly strong Hugo Coghlan, aka Hugo Hercules (the title character of a 1902-1903 comic strip by William H.D. Koerner, who is revealed here to be the Celtic demigod Cuchulainn) to act as her bodyguard. Hugo says that he was paid by “a Mr. Savage Senior” to kill Hugo Danner (the equally superstrong protagonist of Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator) soon after the Great War, though why Savage paid him to do this is not stated. Given the strong moral code he instilled in his son, it seems very unlikely that Doc Savage’s father, Clark Savage Sr., would put out a contract on another man’s life.