Crossover Cover: Return of the King

The Nightbreed battle the monstrous Rawhead Rex. The Nightbreed are already in the CU through an encounter with Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. This crossover brings in the title character of Clive Barker's story "Rawhead Rex."

Crossover Cover: Murder on the Leviathan

Erast Fandorin becomes embroiled in a murder mystery aboard the steamship Leviathan. One of the other passengers, Reginald Milford-Stokes, writes in a letter to his wife, “The Leviathan is the largest passenger ship in the history of the world, with the single exception of the colossal Great Eastern, which has been furrowing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean for the last 20 years. When Jules Verne described the Great Eastern in his book The Floating City, he had not seen our Leviathan—otherwise he would have renamed the old G.E. the floating village.’ That vessel now does nothing but lay telegraph cables on the ocean floor, but Leviathan can transport 1000 people and in addition 10,000 tons of cargo.” Fandorin is already in the CU, and so this novel brings in Verne’s novel The Floating City.

Crossover of the Week

May 1938

THE IRON PHANTOM

            Richard Benson learned hobo code from a man named A-Number One. Nellie Gray and Smitty get into a fight with two men, one of whom is short and apelike, the other well-dressed and wielding a sword cane. Benson goes to the offices of the Classic newspaper seeking information. The editor expresses surprise that Benson came to them rather then the Times or the Planet. Benson asks a Classic reporter named Burke about his interview with inventor Elias Martinson. Martinson at one point was working on a mechanical man, but complications caused him to seek the aid of another inventor, Charles Link. Benson later tells Nellie and Smitty that the men they fought are actually in the same line of work as they are, and that their battle was the result of a misunderstanding.

            Short story by Matthew Baugh in The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible, Nancy Holder and Joe Gentile, eds., Moonstone Books, 2013. A-Number One is from the movie Emperor of the North. Nellie and Smitty’s opponents are Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks, two of Doc Savage’s aides. Clyde Burke, besides being a reporter for the New York Classic, is also one of the Shadow’s agents. The New York Planet is the newspaper that employs Foster Fade, “the Crime Spectacularist,” who appeared in three stories by Lester Dent in All Detective Magazine in 1934. Elias Martinson is meant to be the unnamed inventor from Robert E. Howard’s unfinished El Borak story “The Iron Terror.” Charles Link is the creator of “Eando Binder’s” (Earl and Otto Binder) robot Adam Link.

Crossover Cover: Harbinger

Cervantes Quinn uses a sonic screwdriver he once stole from “a rather daft chap” on Barolia. This is obviously a reference to the CU counterpart of the Doctor of Doctor Who fame.

Crossover Cover: Silence

Private eye Jack Till must save a woman he helped six years ago from assassins Paul and Sylvie Turner. Paul used to receive most of his referrals from the bartender at the Palazzo di Conti restaurant, which was rumored to be a remote outpost for members of the Balacontano family who came west on business. The Balacontano crime family is from Perry’s novels dealing with the assassin known as the Butcher’s Boy. The Butcher’s Boy appears under the pseudonym “the Grocer’s Boy” in Justin Gustainis’ novel Sympathy for the Devil, part of his Morris and Chastain Supernatural Investigations series, which has many crossover references bringing it into the CU. This reference brings in Jack Till as well.