Crossover Cover: The President's Vampire

In the second Nathaniel Cade novel, Cade and Zach Barrows battle a threat that began in Innsmouth in 1928, and at one point Cade flashes back to his part in the Innsmouth raid. In Cairo, Egypt, Cade meets a man called Flint, who was once “The World’s Greatest Secret Agent,” and in his time handled “plots that never made the news: secret space missions, vanishing islands, strange weapons and deadly assassins with steel teeth.” This is clearly Derek Flint from the movies Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. The implication of the description of the plots that he handled seems to be that some of the James Bond films were distorted accounts of Flint's own cases.Other references include: a series of “vampire murders” in Providence, Rhode Island in 1928, during which Benjamin Franklin’s corpse was stolen (from Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"); the “Christmas Invasion” of Kingston Falls, Indiana (from the movie Gremlins); the Pabodie Expedition to the Mountains of Madness (from Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"); a wave of sleeping deaths in Springwood, Ohio (from the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street); the horror at Red Hook, New York in 1925 (from Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook"); a mysterious creature that terrorized Dunwich, Massachusetts in 1928 (from Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror"); a Gill-Man that escaped into the Everglades after being captured in the Amazon in the 1950s (from The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a 1951 Antarctic expedition, following in the footsteps of the Pabodie expedition, that discovered an alien craft (from the movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?," which is already in, but is so different in its plot and characters that both stories could have happened in the CU); the Pod People incident in the 1950s (from the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers); and rumors of a shadowy figure that preyed on criminals in the 1930s and ’40s (the Shadow, of course.)

Crossover Cover: Blood Oath

Christopher Farnsworth has done three novels and one novella featuring Nathaniel Cade, America's vampire secret agent, and his sidekick, former White House aide Zack Barrows. All three novels have crossover references. Before I list the references in the first book, Blood Oath, I should note that the President in the Cade books is a white man named Samuel Curtis, rather than Barack Obama, and his VP is corrupt and works with an evil organization called the Shadow Company. Since one of the core tenets of the CU is that it's virtually identical to our world on the surface, this should be considered a distortion for CU purposes, although the Shadow Company is too central to the plots of the Cade books to not be a real organization there. (For the record, discussion of real world politics in any way other than their relation to the CU is OT on this blog.) Cade’s trophy room includes the skull of a Deep One from Innsmouth (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth"), parts of Brainerd’s Steam Man (from Edward S. Ellis' dime novel story "The Steam Man of the Prairies", a large bright-gold beetle (from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug"), wood from the Devil Tree of British Guiana (from Frank Aubrey's novel The Devil-Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana), and a mummified monkey’s paw (from W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw".) There are several references to the “Teenage Monster” incident in New Jersey (a reference to the events of the film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein) and the “Night of the Living Dead” incident in Pennsylvania (self-explanatory, although in the CU, Romero's film was an exaggeration of a much smaller event, as seen in the film Return of the Living Dead, and the sequels take place in an AU.) A news report about the murder of several camp counselors outside Blairstown, New Jersey by “some bogeyman” is mentioned; there was one survivor. This is a reference to the first Friday the 13th film, which was partly shot in Blairstown. Cade runs up against an old nemesis, the immortal alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel. The immortal St. Germain is mentioned to have visited Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. Dippel and the Count of St. Germain are both historical figures who have appeared in other works set in the CU. I will cover the crossovers in the other two books in the next few days.

Crossover Cover: Lai Wan: Tales of the Dreamwalker

The late C.J. Henderson wrote several stories about a female Chinese psychometrist named Lai Wan, who first debuted in his Teddy London stories, which are in the CU. This collection featuring the character includes four stories co-written with other authors, in which Lai Wan is teamed with those authors' characters. "Family Ties" is co-written by Patrick Thomas, and has Agent Karver and his partner Mandi Cobb of Thomas' Department of Mystic Affairs enlisting Lai Wan's aid in tracking down Mandi's kidnapped nephew. The Department of Mystic Affairs tales are a spin-off of Thomas' Murphy's Lore series, and he has done several other spin-off books for characters from that series. "Innocent Monsters" teams Lai Wan with John L. French's Baltimore police detective Bianca Jones, who regularly runs into the supernatural (I did a Crossover of the Week post about Bianca's origin story, "Out of the Blackness," a while ago.) Henderson and Bruce Gehweiler's "One Night in Chinatown" has Lai Wan working with former Sheriff Donna Fargo, who now works for Doctors Blakely and Boles, supernatural experts appearing in a series of stories by Henderson and Gehweiler that are collected in the book Where Angels Fear. Finally, John Sunseri and Henderson's "Not What One Does" has Lai Wan and Sunseri's NSA agent Jack Dixon battling a shoggoth.

Bonus Crossover Cover: The X-Files: Year Zero

The X-Files: Year Zero features Mulder and Scully investigating the origins of their FBI division. In the second issue, the two are at a diner, and their waitress asks if they want more coffee. Scully says no thanks, and Mulder says, "Although it IS damn fine coffee, as a friend of mine in the Pacific Northwest would say." This friend is FBI Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks, my all time favorite television series, which is coming back for a long-awaited third season on Showtime in 2016.

Crossover Covers: Vampirella and Shi

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.)

Crossover Covers: Witchblade: Shades of Gray

Sara Pezzini meets Dorian Gray.

Crossover Cover: Son of Holmes

 

This novel features Auguste Lupa, the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Lupa is clearly meant to be Nero Wolfe, whom John D. Clark and William S. Baring-Gould previously speculated was Holmes and Irene's son. Lescroart also reveals that Mycroft Holmes was Sir Miles Messervy's predecessor as M, the head of the British Secret Service, a theory also used by Alan Moore in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Crossover Cover: The Rocketeer: Jet-Pack Adventures

This anthology of prose stories from IDW, which I'm currently reading, has at least five stories with crossovers. In Don Webb's story "Nazis in Paradise," the languages spoken by a linguist on an expedition to Tibet are listed, including Tcho-Tcho, the name of a race in Cthulhu Mythos fiction by August Derleth. Gregory Frost's "Farewell, My Rocketeer" has an appearance by Simon Templar (aka the Saint) and Patricia Holm, though they are only referred to by their first names. In Simon Kurt Unsworth's "Atoll of Terror," a British scientist working for the Nazis says, "Those sanctimonious fools drove me out [of England], just like Moreau before me, another visionary exiled for attempting to expand the scope of mankind." Near the end of Nancy A. Collins' "Codename: Ecstasy," Cliff tells Hedy Lamarr, "I know a guy called Doc who's big on rehabilitation through applied brain surgery. If it works on criminals, it should work on Nazis, too." Lisa Morton's "The Rivet Gang" has Ham and Monk appearing; surprisingly, they're actually referred to by those names, though Doc Savage is only identified as the Big Boss.

Crossover Cover: Deathrise