This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.
As regular readers of this blog will have noticed by now, there are a number of things I’m obsessed with: series, short stories, Dracula (and the rest of Bram Stoker’s works), King Arthur, Macbeth, novellas, book series published with a “trade dress” of some kind, television series that last only one season, making lists, redheads, pistachio ice cream (okay, maybe those last two are not quite as obvious if you haven’t been around me in person) … and crossovers. I love when characters from different shows/movies/books appear together in whatever form: full on crossovers, or wink-wink-nudge-nudge passing references.
But as much as I love crossovers, I have friends who love them even more. Friends who love them so much, they’ve written entire books chronicling them. In other words, they’ve written a series about crossovers between literary characters, including Dracula and King Arthur, from movies, television, novels, novellas, short stories and comic books. That combination obviously pushes a lot of my buttons.
The series is called Crossovers: A Secret History of the World. Volumes 1 (from the Dawn of Time to 1939) and 2 (1940 to The Future) were written by Win Scott Eckert and published by Black Coat Press in 2010. Win passed the very heavy baton to Sean Lee Levin, who wrote Crossovers Expanded Volumes 1 and 2 which were published by Meteor House Press in 2016. Crossovers published since 2016 have been chronicled by Sean Lee Levin in a Crossovers Universe group on Facebook.
There is some impressive scholarship and dedication that went into producing these books. The average length of each volume is 450 pages. That’s a lot of reading, viewing, checking sources, and cross-referencing. Every entry includes a synopsis of the crossover, indicates where the characters/settings/objects in the crossover first appeared, and identifies the creators of said characters/settings/objects.
This is not just a random collection of chronologically-organized entries featuring every crossover in existence. There are rules to this Crossover Universe that Win and Sean have curated, rules that help organize the entire idea and present a cohesive whole despite how disparate the source material and authors referenced are.
Win built the concept off of Philip Jose Farmer’s “Wold Newton Family” literary biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, where the idea was that Burroughs and Dent (and many other authors) simply fictionalized true events that took place in “the world outside our window.” Thus, the basic tenet of the Crossover Universe: if it changes the history we know or presents the world we know as technologically more advanced than it really is, it doesn’t fit in this particular CU. So first instance, there are very few costumed, highly-powered super-heroes in the mix, and what few there are usually have notations that in the Crossover Universe, those characters are not as powerful or as world-changing. There are a lot of “street level costumed crusaders” in the mix, though – from the Lone Ranger to the various iterations of The Green Hornet and Batman to more recent folks like Luke Cage and Iron Fist. This is vital to maintaining the basic conceit of the Crossover Universe: costumed crusaders in trench coats or martial arts gear might get a lot of notice at the local level, and may even become “urban legends” (I’m looking at you, Batman), but entire teams of gaudily-costumed flying, fiery, winged, giant super-heroes and their super-tech crafts would be way too much for the “world outside our window.”
Likewise, Kaiju are also effectively off the table as their movie rampages destroy whole cities, but there are notations that some smaller version of Godzilla, for instance, exist in the CU with less world-devastating events. And of course Skull Island and King Kong exist here. There are no full-scale zombie outbreaks, but smaller localized zombie events that are quickly quelled and pass into being urban legends have happened in the CU. Vampiric, demonic and alien convergences the entire world notices are out (sorry, Independence Day fans), but smaller vampiric communities (The Lost Boys), deals with the devil (too numerous to list) and hidden aliens (hi, X-Files) are all frequent reasons for characters to crossover.
What else is in? Prehistoric characters from Conan to Ayesha to Hadon of Opar. Historical fiction characters like King Arthur, Solomon Kane, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Dracula. Famous detectives like Holmes, Miss Marple and Lincoln Rhyme are included, as are occult/paranormal detectives from Thomas Carnacki to Carl Kolchak to Buffy Summers and the Mulder-Scully team. Slasher flicks are rife with crossovers. And because it would be unprofessional not to mention it, one of my own stories is included: “So Much Loss,” taking place in 1897, in which Arthur Holmwood and Jack Seward, having moved in together and declared their love after the events of Dracula, mourn the loss of Lucy Westenra and team up with French occult investigator Sar Dubnotal to deal with one of Lucy’s unfortunate legacies. (The story also features a sneaky tie to the television series Lost, just for the heck of it.)
More stories featuring crossovers are published weekly. Not all of them fit the continuity established by Win and Sean; some of them purport to tell the “true story” of an earlier work in a way that doesn’t fit with the original works timeframe or facts while some repeat stories already told by others. There are, after all, only so many times Holmes can have met Dracula or Jack the Ripper “for the first time.” There are only so many times Mars can invade Earth before the general public begins to notice it’s not just mass hysteria. There are only so many disparate futures a universe can have. If the contradictions are small and easily reconciled, the authors engage in a bit of “creative mythography” to make them fit. If the details are just too incongruous, the stories are relegated to “exciting alternate universes.” The idea has always been to be as inclusive as possible while still keeping some organization to the whole, and Eckert and Levin succeed at making it all consistent.
Of course, anyone can create their own universe which characters crossover. Want more superheroes in your mix? Want none at all? Want to completely remove the works of authors you don’t like? Go for it, make it your own. I love reading different people’s takes on what is or isn’t in their particular head-canon of crossovers. But I have to give, and will always give, Win Scott Eckert and Sean Lee Levin for creating such a comprehensive, creative, and consistent Crossover Universe through these four books and Sean’s ongoing Crossover Universe Facebook page.