Crossover of the Week

1991

NOT JUST A JOB

            A man Freddy Krueger has chosen as his new human protégé gets a book from the Springwood library that features a chapter on Krueger, as well as “the infamous John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Henry Lee Lucas, as well as less well-known deviants such as Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and the Sawyer family of Texas.”

            Short story by Nancy A. Collins in Nightmares on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger’s Seven Sweetest Dreams, Martin H. Greenberg, ed., St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Gacy, Bundy, and Lucas are all historical serial killers. Michael Myers is from the Halloween series of movies, Voorhees is from the Friday the 13^th films, and the Sawyer family is from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series of films, furthering the connection between these series.

Crossover Cover: The Spider: Shadow of Evil

Shakespeare, Montaigne, and John Raymond Legrasse are quoted on the subject of evil. Richard Wentworth tells Commissioner Kirkpatrick that he’ll be enjoying a fine meal at the Cobalt Club while Kirkpatrick is accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Ladies Auxiliary. William Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne were real people, but John Raymond Legrasse, from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” is not. Henderson has chronicled Legrasse’s further exploits in a series of stories. The Cobalt Club is from the Shadow novels. Wentworth celebrates his birthday, allegedly his fortieth, early in the book. However, Wentworth was born in 1891, which would make this birthday actually his fifty-third. There is also a bonus story, “Lights, Camera, Murder!” by Rich Harvey. Ed Race, the Masked Marksman, investigates the sabotage of a film being made by a friend of his. A grimy storefront set reminds Race of old Doc Turner’s drugstore in Manhattan. Race had his own series of stories by Emile C. Tepperman in The Spider pulp magazine. Doc Turner, a pharmacist and amateur detective, appeared in stories by Arthur Leo Zagat in the same magazine. Both Race and Turner encountered the Spider in 1934, as seen in Harvey’s story “One Death to a Customer,” bringing them both into the CU.

Crossover Cover: From Hell with Love

The Droods go to war with Doctor Delirium and the Immortals over the Apocalypse Door. Appearing or mentioned are: U.N.C.L.E. and THRUSH (from the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.); James Bond and S.P.E.C.T.R.E.(from Ian Fleming's novels); a Martian tripod (from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds); a Crystal Egg (from another story by Wells); the Danse Academy in the German Black Forest (from Dario Argento's horror film Suspiria); Dracula (from Bram Stoker's novel); the Nightside (the setting of another series by Green); Shadows Fall (from Green's novel of the same name); a Time War (possibly the CU version of the war seen in Doctor Who); the Carnacki Institute (from Green's Ghost Finders books); Bradford-on-Avon, Carys Galloway, the Waking Beauty, Jimmy Thunder, God for Hire, and Nicholas Hob, the Serpent’s Son (all from Green's novel Drinking Midnight Wine, though this Bradford-on-Avon is a fictionalized version of the real town of that name, where Green lives); Doctor Faustus (from Christopher Marlowe's play); Indiana Jones; the Djinn Jeannie (from the television series I Dream of Jeannie); the recently dead Griffin in the Nightside, the Lord of Thorns, the Speaking Gun, and the Collector (all from the Nightside books); Old Father Time (also from Shadows Fall); a Kandarian amulet (a reference to the Kandarian demons from the Evil Dead films); Castle Frankenstein (from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein); the Bride of Frankenstein (from the Universal film of the same name); Area 52 (located in the Antarctic, and therefore presumably the same one seen in a titular miniseries published by Image Comics); and a bizarre alien city inside an Arctic mountain (possibly a reference to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.)