DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 2: Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man

Though well aware of its existence, and familiar enough with it that I knew of its dynamic cover by Carmine Infantino and Ross Andru, Dick Giordano and Terry Austin, I had never actually read the 1976 Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, the very first collaboration between the two biggest American comic book publishers* and the first time any of their characters would meet one another in a shared story.

I had a pretty good excuse, though. I wasn't yet born when the book originally hit newsstands (Although I guess I had a second chance when it was collected in 1991's Crossover Classics, and a third chance in 1995 when it was republished in a "special collector's edition").

The recently released DC Versus Marvel Omnibus is giving me another chance though, and this time I seized it.

This collection certainly primes the reader to appreciate just how significant the comic was at the time. 

There are several different prose pieces from various comics professionals that discuss the book's publication. These stress the care that went into assembling the perfect creative team: Writer Gerry Conway was chosen as the only one at the time to have written both characters, pencil artist Ross Andru because he had drawn both and was the current Amazing Spider-Man artist. They also stress the incredible cross-company wrangling that went into every panel. (In his afterword to the collection, Tom Brevoort writes that "Superman/Clark Kent and Spider-Man/Peter Parker appear in exactly the same number of panels in the story and are in aggregate the same relative sizes in each." He didn't believe Marvel and DC were quite that exacting with the portrayal of the characters when he first heard it, so he actually consulted the text to check it out for himself and realized that they actually were.)

Readers at the time would also have been clear on what a big deal it was. Not just because superhero comics fans would have of course known that the two publishers' characters had never met, but because of the presentation of the book: It was published in tabloid format and cost a whole $2.00. That will seem like a steal to today's serial comics readers, who are used to shelling out $3.99 for a 20-ish page story, but in 1976, the average comic book was still only 30 cents. 

The original comic also contained a pair of short introductions running in parallel columns on its inside front cover, one from Marvel's Stan Lee and one from DC's Carmine Infantino, both trumpeting the rarity of the occasion. 

Inside, the action pauses at three points for page-length recaps of the origins of the heroes and the villains (the latter of whom share a single page), apparently there for any DC-only readers who weren't sure who this Spider-Man fellow was, or any Marvel-only readers who were somehow unfamiliar with Superman's whole deal.

As to why those two characters were chosen, well, that's obvious enough as to probably be not really worth mentioning. They were each publishers' most popular flagship characters, and each was the apotheosis of his respective publisher's protagonists. 

As for the villains involved, they are Superman's archenemy Lex Luthor and Spider-Man's villain Doctor Octopus, who are both derivations of the basic mad scientist archetype. (Reading this in 2024, I did wonder why the Green Goblin wasn't chosen as the Spider-Man villain featured, as the movies and 21st century comics had lead me to believe that he was Spider-Man's number one adversary. Was that not the case in the mid-70s? Or was the Green Goblin currently dead at that time?)

The book opens with a splash page featuring the two characters facing off, with the credits between them—oddly enough, "Edited By: Carmine Infantino and Stan Lee" is the top credit, perhaps this book's equivalent to "Stan Lee Presents"...?—and the title of the story blaring in the lower left corner: "The Battle of the Century!"

From there we get a 15-page Superman solo story in "Prologue 1". After a great double-page spread of Andru's Superman streaking into action towards a giant, city-smashing (and now rather retro-looking) robot, we get what amounts to a Superman solo story. 

The robot, piloted by Lex Luthor (wearing his familiar Super Friends get-up) steals a maguffin from S.T.A.R. Labs, and though Superman defeats the robot, Luthor and the doohickey escape. Superman briefly returns to the Galaxy Communications Building—this was during the time Clark was a TV news anchor—where we meet jerk prankster Steve Lombard, Galaxy owner Morgan Edge and Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen. Clark's not there long, though, leaving to track down Luthor for another battle, one that ends with Luthor being taken to jail...after he stashes the thingamabob for later use. 

From there, Clark and some co-workers take off for New York City, where they will be attending the "World News Conference."

After the aforementioned page detailing Superman's origin (In five panels and about 75 words; Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely would famously get it down to just four panels and eight words in 2006's All-Star Superman), it's Spider-Man's turn. 

His "Prologue 2" is also a 15-page solo story, this one opening with a double-page splash of Spidey reclining on a flagpole, as his Spidey sense alerts him to the presence of some thieves atop a nearby roof-top (These splashes look great in this format; I can only imagine how impressive they were in the original tabloid format). 

The thieves turn out to be in the employ of Doctor Octopus, who Spidey battles until the villain makes his getaway in a flying ship with its own set of tentacles. The police show up just in time up to chase Spider-Man away, their guns blazing (That's one big difference between the two red-and-blue clad heroes; Spidey is considered an outlaw vigilante, while Superman is embraced as a beloved celebrity).

Peter Parker stops at the Daily Bugle to sell pictures of the Spider-Man/Doc Ock fight to J. Jonah Jameson, a sequence that includes these two sublime panels, depicting Jameson's reaction to a terrible, terrible photo of Parker's that Jameson accidentally had run on the front-page. From there, there's a few panels of an attempted date with Mary Jane Watson, during which Parker must make a lame excuse, dash off to become Spider-Man and resume his battle with Doc Ock, this time defeating him and sending him to jail. 

In the last panel, Parker and the Bugle staff head to the same news convention the Galaxy staff was headed to.

The two prologues, which have now accounted for 30 whole pages of the book, or well more than your average superhero adventure already, do a great job then of establishing the characters, in costume and out, as well as their basic milieus and supporting casts and ongoing conflicts.

It's worth noting that both look, read and feel like a regular Super-Man story and a regular Spider-Man story—or, I suppose one could say, a "real" Superman story and a "real" Spider-Man story—which likely argues that the publishers made the right call in hiring creators with past experience on both characters. 

It helps, I suppose, that this was a time in which both superhero publishers were much more strict with the basic designs, looks and depictions of their stable of characters, and they tended to have to be drawn a certain way in order to look like themselves. These days, there is much more leniency given to super-comics artists, and designs can vary quite radically, depending on the personal styles and whims of the artists. (By the way, some of the aforementioned prose pieces noted that John Romita Sr., one of the two definitive Spider-Man artists, was tasked with re-drawing the Peter Parker faces in this comic, just as Neal Adams re-drew some of the Superman figures. Neither is credited for their work in the final product, however.)

And then, after a one-page, five-panel Spider-Man origin recap, it's time for a third prologue, this one a much shorter, five-page one in which Lex Luthor and Dr. Otto Octavius meet one another in New Mexico federal "Maximum X Security Penitentiary Number One," apparently some sort of special prison just for super-villains. Despite supposedly being escape-proof, Luthor breaks them both out and they escape together, with Luthor riding on Doc Ock's back like he was a horsey as he runs away on his metal tentacles.

Then, finally, it's time for the crossover to really start. 

At the news conference, Clark tells Lois Lane about "Comlab One-- The world's first orbiting communications laboratory!", which is apparently on display there. Lois then meets young Peter Parker, who saves her from a fall, and then, immediately afterwards, she meets a rather petty and possessive MJ (MJ: "I guess you're not the liberated type--eh, 'Miss' Lane? Some men like that sort of thing. Some men dig their women, 'feminine'." Lois: "Pull the claws in, MJ. Peter's cute-- --but he's a bit young for me, don't you think?")

Then, suddenly, Superman—actually, "Superman"—swoops in, fires weird beams from his eyes at the ladies, and then they both disappear, as the hero flies away. 

Clark and Peter both rush to change clothes and then meet in the sky over the roof-tops for the first time, the moment afforded another two-page splash. 

In Marvel fashion, they immediately come to blows, Superman having "heard reports" about Spidey and thus assuming he's behind Lois' bizarre disappearance, and Spidey, having seen Superman blast them with eyebeams, assuming Supes is to blame (In actuality, it was Luthor disguised as Superman; Luthor also gives Spidey a surreptitious blast of a "red sun radiation device" to power him up enough so that he'll be able to go toe-to-toe with Superman...at least for the length of a fight scene). 

What follows then is a dynamic 12-page fight scene, unusual in its length and choreography. It doesn't end until the red sun radiation wears off, and there's a fun sequence in which Spidey pounds away at Spider-Man for several panels, Andru drawing multiple arms on the wall-crawler to suggest how often and how fast he's throwing punches into Superman's chest and abdomen, and Superman just stands their stoically, absorbing the ineffectual blows, until Spider-Man steps back to look at his hands, now encased in pink jagged lines to suggest pain, and remark "Oboy." 

With their battle over (The unsurprising winner in a contest of super powers? Superman), the two finally calm down, realize neither is to blame for their love interests' disappearances, and decide to team-up, with Superman dragging Spidey behind him as he flies by a strand of webbing, Spidey having somehow fashioned skies of webbing to "air-ski" behind Man of Steel.

After pages of investigation, the two heroes eventually track Luthor and Doc Ock to the abandoned satellite headquarters of Luthor's Injustice Gang, from where Luthor enacts his world-imperiling plan. Using the thing stolen from S.T.A.R. in the first prologue, he's able to hijack that fancy communications satellite that Clark pointed out to Lois (and readers) earlier, using it to fire a beam that somehow generates hurricanes numerous and powerful enough to engulf the whole world (I'm not a scientist, so I'll just have to take Luthor's word for it that making giant hurricanes is well within the abilities of the communications satellite). 

Luthor will only relent and call off the super-storms if the United States government pays him "ten billion dollars within the next hour."

As Superman leaps out of the satellite and flies to Earth to intercept a two-hundred-mile tidal wave that will destroy the Atlantic coast of America, Spidey battles the villains, encouraging Doc Ock to ultimately turn on the mad Luthor ("I can't let you do it, Luthor!" Octavius cries as he smashes computers with a tentacle, "The Earth is my home, too!")

Eventually, the day is saved, as are the heroes' respective love interests, both of whom are at this point in history completely ignorant of the double-lives their men are currently leading.

At 100 pages—bigger even than an 80-page giant!—the book likely read as appropriately epic in 1976, and surely the bicentennial kids at the time would have felt they got their two bucks worth. Heck, at that length, it's basically a short graphic novel, published at a time when that word wasn't part of the average comics reader's regular parlance.

Conway and company certainly do a fine job of thoroughly introducing their heroes and villains, to an extent that later crossovers wouldn't even attempt, as the publishers would eventually (perhaps rightly) assume that anyone reading superhero comics at all would be pretty familiar with the participants in any crossovers (Like, why would you even pick up a book about Batman and The Punisher or Galactus and Darkseid if you weren't already familiar with them...?).

The creators also devote themselves to comparing and contrasting these heroes, boiling down and then accentuating what make them each unique and likable in the first place, and giving readers little moments of interest, like the panels in which MJ and Lois meet one another, or those where Edge and Jameson run into one another and discuss their talented but lacking employees Kent and Parker.

It's pretty much the ideal inter-company crossover comic.

That said, the intensity that went into the discussions and behind-the-scenes crafting of the comic was such that neither Marvel nor DC seemed to want to repeat it, even though it was the first of a whole series of crossover comics, being followed by a 1981 re-teaming of Superman and Spider-Man and a Batman/Hulk crossover, and then a 1982 Uncanny X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover. 

For each of these, the publishers would essentially take turns running the crossovers, so that they didn't need two teams of executives and editors counting panels or measuring figure drawings on the way to production. 

We'll look at the first of these second-wave crossovers next week. 

Next: 1981's Marvel Treasury Edition #28, featuring Spider-Man and Superman

*Actually, Tom Brevoort writes in his DC Versus Marvel Omnibus afterword that while the companies were in discussions for the Superman/Spider-Man crossover, both happened to be working on different adaptations of The Wizard of Oz. Rather than compete with dueling comics, they released their first joint venture: MGM's Marvelous Wizard of Oz. That comic does not, of course, appear in the omnibus. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Part 1: All the non-comics content

I'm not a fan of the giant omnibus format. 

The inches-thick hardcovers are just too big, too heavy and too unwieldy. Those that I've handled before, both the ones I've bought and the ones I've seen at the library (where they tend to suffer a lot more damage than smaller comics collections and need repairs far more often), tend to make unwholesome sounding creaks if I hold them at the wrong angle or open them too wide, as if threatening to break on me. 

They're certainly hard to take with you anywhere, barely fitting in a messenger bag and threatening to bust out of it, so they aren't books that I can read on my lunch breaks, or when dining out alone at a restaurant. And even in the comfort of one's home they can be difficult to read, as one can only read them in certain positions.

If publishers must release giant omnibus format books, I would prefer they do so in paperback form, like the recent-ish Sandman Mystery Theater Compendium Vol. 1 that DC released last year. At 980 pages, it was of course still very big, very heavy and very unwieldly, but it was doable, and its basic integrity didn't seem threatened by its own weight or seem unstable like an old rickety, ramshackle house in a storm.

All that said, I do find myself occasionally attracted to the books that get published in the format and have even bought one: DC's 2022 Batman No Man's Land Omnibus Vol. 1, a thousand-pager collecting the many stories published under the "No Man's Land" banner. I only made it about 100 pages into it before giving up, though; it was just too hard to read. 

Despite my dislike of the format, I couldn't resist the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, a huge hardcover collecting about half of the stories the two publishers have collaborated on over the years, with the other half relegated to a second volume, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, which looks like it's currently slated for a late December release (More on which publications are in which books below). 

While there's some historical significance for these rare-ish publications, and an awful lot of work by some of the greatest and best-known talents to work in mainstream comics among them, I've read remarkably few of them, partly because many were published before my time, partly because of my ambivalence about the Marvel characters (I didn't really read any Marvel until a good decade after I started reading comics, and never developed the sense of loyalty or ownership of their characters and universe that I felt for DC's) and partly because they were relatively hard to find. 

This then, offered a chance get them all in one fell swoop, even if it was awfully pricey for a single comic book. Still, I've been buying fewer and fewer comics in any format, I could afford it. (As long-time readers have surely noticed, I gave up on serially-published comics some years ago—with only very rare exceptions—and I now try to buy as few trades and collections as possible, given how quickly they can fill up my bookshelves, and my bookshelves then fill up my living space.)

Given the enormity of the book, which contains almost 20 over-sized comics stories and hundreds of pages of extras, it would simply be too big to review in a single "A Month of Wednesdays" blog post, or even in a single blog post devoted to the book alone.

So, as I mentioned the other day, my plan is to tackle the book crossover by crossover, and basically review my way through it. 

Before reading the first crossover story, though, I decided I should devote a post to all the...stuff in the book, given how much of it there actually is. So let's here take a look at all the stuff other than the comics content, before digging into the first of the crossovers. 

Let's start with the basic outline of the tome. 

The 960-page collection includes almost every DC/Marvel character crossover, from the classic 1976 Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man to the millennial Batman/Daredevil. That means that, in addition to those two stories, the omnibus includes (deep breath) Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (Superman and Spider-Man again), DC Special Series #27 (Batman vs. The Hulk), Marvel and DC Present: The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans #1, Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1 (featuring the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman, weirdly enough), Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1, Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1, Spider-Man and Batman #1, Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliances #1, Silver Surfer/Superman #1, Batman/Captain America #1, Daredevil/Batman #1, Batman/Spider-Man #1, Superman/Fantastic Four #1 and Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1. 

So, what's missing? 

Well, most obviously given the title of this cinder block of a collection is 1996's four-issue miniseries DC Vs. Marvel. That's slated to be collected in the upcoming DC Vs. Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, along with all of the Amalgam one-shots, and the two sequel miniseries, DC/Marvel All Access and Unlimited Access. This makes sense, given that the Amalgam comics, each of which featured brand-new heroes that combined DC and Marvel characters, resulted from the events of the DC Vs. Marvel series, as at one point during the proceedings the two fictional universes are fused into a new combined universe.

Also missing is 2003's JLA/Avengers, which is not slated for inclusion in the Amalgam Age Omnibus. It's a curious, and quite unfortunate, omission, as that four-issue crossover series by Kurt Busiek and George Perez is the best of the DC/Marvel crossovers (at least of those that I've read) and one of the better inter-company crossovers of all time. 

It's also, one imagines, the single crossover that would be of the greatest interest to the largest number of readers, given not only its quality and the reputation of its creators, but also the current high profile of the two teams, particularly the Avengers, who weren't exactly the household name they are now 20 years ago.

JLA/Avengers was first collected in a 2004 hardcover set, and then again in 2008 as a trade paperback. An extremely limited edition was released in 2022 to help the now late Perez with his medical bills, and demand then was quite high, which made me assume it would be collected herein. Perhaps if these two omnibuses sell well enough DC and Marvel will see fit to also re-release JLA/Avengers. 

As for this collection, it actually starts out with some Perez art, as the cover is a Perez piece referencing the first couple of DC/Marvel crossovers, repurposed from the 1991 Crossover Classics collection. (If you bought or buy the omnibus through the direct market though, you also have the opportunity to choose a variant cover edition featuring a new image by Jim Lee and Scott Williams; it's not the greatest work from Lee, and, compositionally at least, is nowhere near as strong or dynamic an image as the Perez cover, but, given Lee's early years as a superstar artist at Marvel followed by a career as an executive at DC, he's probably one of the best choices to produce a cover for a book like this.)

Given just how many pages of comics content there are in this book, it might be surprising that the publishers found room for other miscellanea to include, but there are several introductions and forewords, two afterwords and plenty of backmatter.

First here's a brand-new introduction from Paul Levitz dated February of this year. Levitz notes that he was "in the room where it happened" when it came to that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover that was the very first collaboration between the two publishers, which for a majority of their history were among the most bitter rivals in the industry. 

Levitz was, at that time, an assistant editor to DC editor to Gerry Conway, who was chosen by the executives to write the crossover, as he was, at the time, the only person to have written both characters. The art team was similarly chosen to best represent the two publishers and their respective flagship characters: Pencil artist Ross Andru was the only artist to have drawn both characters and was then working as Spidey's primary artist, and inker Dick Giordano was chosen because he was widely regarded as the best inker in the business.

Levitz would go on to be involved in the next round of inter-company crossovers: The next Superman/Spider-Man crossover, that of Batman and The Hulk, and that of the X-Men and Teen Titans, after which things fell apart, and the publishers wouldn't see fit to try again for another decade or so (That decade, of course, was the '90s, the decade in which the vast majority of the stories in this collection were published).

Levitz's introduction is followed by not one, not two, but three forewords, each of which was previously published in the previously mentioned Crossover Classics collection. These are by Conway, Giordano and Tom DeFalco, and all focus on that initial Supes/Spidey book. 

The next prose piece, also culled from the pages of Crossover Classics, is by Marv Wolfman, and details how he almost wrote the second Supes/Spidery crossover (Instead, Jim Shooter would get the honor, though the comic's credits include a notation reading "Special thanks to Marv Wolfman for plot suggestions.") He also mentions being pegged to write the second X-Men/Teen Titans crossover...a crossover that never actually came to pass. 

That's followed by two story-specific introductions from Crossover Classics, one by Batman/Hulk writer Len Wein and another by X-Men/Teen Titans writer Chris Claremont. 

About 300 pages in we get another prose piece original to this volume, this one from long-time Marvel and DC editor Mike Carlin, dated March 2024. In it, he discusses the resumption of DC/Marvel crossovers with 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. This comic, and the dozen or so crossovers that followed, resulted from, as Carlin explains, a new generation of writers and editors coming in at both publishers, ending the "cold war" between Marvel and DC (And it helped that these newcomers were all comics fans turned comics pros, and thus had an entirely different attitude about the characters than their predecessors). He also seems to intimate that a new cold war began in the early years of the century (with JLA/Avengers being the sole exception of new DC/Marvel collaborations), seemingly because "some new players would join the mix in the early 2000s."

After the last pages of 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, we get a pair of afterwords, both written specifically for this collection.

The first is from writer Ron Marz, who is quite familiar with the intercompany crossover, having written the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, as well as Green Lantern/Silver Surfer (and several DC/Dark Horse crossovers). He cites one of the crossovers collected in this book as having reignited his passion for the medium when he was a teenager and had drifted away from super-comics: Claremont and Walt Simonson's X-Men/Teen Titans book, which he reveals he still keeps a copy of in his desk to pull out and flip through whenever he feels the need for inspiration.

That's followed by a very interesting piece by Tom Brevoort, who reveals the original idea for the Superman/Spider-Man team-up was not for a comic book at all, but for a movie. That was the idea of David Obst, the literary agent that kickstarted the first DC/Marvel crossover, anyway. (The idea of such a film sounds pretty insane to even imagine in 1976, two years before the first Superman movie and 26 years before the first Spider-Man movie. Even today, in the years after characters as unlikely as Ant-Man, Aquaman, The Guardians of The Galaxy and Blue Beetle III have all had a movie or two or three, the idea of a DC/Marvel crossover movie still seems so unlikely as to sound crazy.)

Brevoort also discusses a few tidbits about that original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, like the fact that Neal Adams and John Romita Sr. did some uncredited touching up of the art, and the mathematic specificity that went into the story, with each hero appearing in the exact same number of panels and being drawn at the same size in aggregate (If Superman appeared in the foreground and Spider-Man in the distant background of one panel, for example, there would be another panel where Supes was in the background and Spidey foregrounded).

And if you're beginning to think that this sounds like an awful lot of bonus material for a book that pretty much sells itself, wait—there's more!

There's Conway's nine-page story outline for the original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, about 100 pages of art (much of it in black and white) with notes from many of the creators who worked on the pages (Darryl Banks, J.M. DeMatteis, Barry Kitson, Ron Lim, Ron Marz, Roger Stern), the covers from the four Crossover Classic collections (pencilled by Perez, John Romita Jr., Salvador Larroca and Ed McGuinness), Alex Ross' homage to Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (from a 1999 issue of Wizard Magazine), a fold-out of Dan Jurgens' and Ross' cover to Superman/Fantastic Four, a fold-out by John Byrne and Terry Austin promoting DC Vs. Marvel (which also adorns the cover of the collection, under the book jacket), a few pages of house ads promoting the various crossovers and, in the edition I got anyway, a fold-out of Jim Lee's variant cover for the omnibus, full-color on one side and black and white on the other.

It's an awful lot of stuff, without even accounting for the comics stories themselves. As much as it is, it's welcome. This is, after all, a book selling for over a $100—it's labeled for $150, though I didn't pay that much for my copy—so it's nice to see the publishers seemingly doing as much as they can to make it worth that high price. 

Now, with all that out of the way, I guess I'm ready to start actually reading the comics themselves, huh?

Next: 1976's Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1