Namor is exhibiting one of his little-known Golden Age abilities there, turning parts of his body completely transparent. Is it just me, or is Sparky actually an Oompa Loompa? Each of these heroes bears a striking resemblance to one of the founding members of the Invaders, over in the Marvel Universe, especially Rusty, who is nothing more than a Player-2 palette swap of Captain America’s sidekick Bucky… At the end of Freedom Fighters #7, the readers were introduced to the latest threat to the Freedom Fighters, a group called The Crusaders! (There’s a reason they rebooted this world, after all.) Traveling to that selfsame Earth-1, Uncle Sam and his band of Freedom Fighters have found themselves adrift in a very 70’s kind of identity crisis, complete with existential ennui and high gas prices. Quality went south, and DC acquired their superhero assets, leading to the revelation that these heroes existed on the parallel world of Earth-X, where World War II was fought well into the 1970’s, and only ended with the direct intervention of the Justice League of America from Earth-1. Back in the 1940’s, a separate publishing company, Quality Comics, was the home of the characters that would become known as the Freedom Fighters. In the pre-Crisis DC Universe, things get more complicated. (It is an established part of Marvel lore that the Torch himself set Hitler on fire in the Bunker in Berlin.) In the Marvel Universe, the greatest heroes of the land (Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, Bucky, The Human Torch and Toro) banded together as The Invaders, and fought their way through Europe, eventually winning the war for the Allies. Previously, in The Invaders and The Freedom Fighters: World War II will always be important in the lore of superheroes, being the era from which the costumed crime-fighter archetype as we know it sprang. Steve Skeates used the Sub-Mariner’s book to wrap up a plot leftover from an issue of Aquaman he wrote a couple years earlier, while the story of Roy Thomas’ trip to Rutland Vermont crosses multiple universes (a long story I’ll probably get to sooner or later.) But this, my young friends, is the story of the crossover that sorta wasn’t a crossover at all, while allowing Uncle Sam to fistfight Captain America or a reasonable fascimile thereof, thus making comic fans happy. Long before the actual Marvel DC crossovers of the 90’s (most of which were pretty banal affairs, with the exception of the awesome Batman/Captain America), there were a number of unofficial blink-and-you-missed-it crossovers from the creative teams that made the comics. Or – “Before Marvel & DC Editorial Got All Passive-Aggressive…”
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