Not so subtle: In Ultimate Spider-Man, among some boxes in Peter’s basement is a sled with the word Rosebud written on it.
More subtle: In Kingdom Come, a bookstore display of superhero biographies includes Under the Hood by Hollis Mason.
Very subtle: In the first issue of Y: The Last Man, moments after every man on earth, save the title character, has died simultaneously, a lone woman at mission control listens to a broadcast from space saying, “Houston, Houston, do you read?”.
[spoiler]1. In the movie Citizen Kane, newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane dies whispering the word “Rosebud”. A reporter researches his life to find the meaning, but never does. Rosebud was the name of Kane’s most cherished childhood toy, a sled.
One of the characters in Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a costumed hero named Nite Owl. He is one of the first generation of costumed heroes, several of whom join together to form a crimefighting group called The Minutemen. After retiring, he reveals his secret identity, policeman Hollis Mason, and writes about his time in the Minutemen in the book Under the Hood.
Houston, Houston, Do You Read is the title of a James Tiptree, Jr. novella in which a group of three (male) astronauts have been thrown forward in time only to find that all of the men on earth have long since died, leaving an all-female utopia. Nearly everyone in Y: The Last Man considers their situation to be a nightmare.[/spoiler]
Well, an early issue of “Spider-Girl” has May Parker making a sarcastic reference to her (nonexistant) “secret lair,” and the “Big Penny” stored therein.
A clear enough reference to Batman, I think.
Though it begs the question…if DC characters are “fictional” in the Marvel universe, does that mean that whenever there’s a Marvel/DC crossover, the Marvelites would be able to get intimate knowledge about their counterparts, just by reading comic books?
Just imagine the look on Batman’s face when he finds out his secret identity’s been blown, albeit in another universe, for $1.50 an issue.
Yeah, and how come Marvel and DC keep doing crossovers? They never explained how it is that Spiderman and Batman ever teamed up, or Bats and Punisher, or him and Daredevil. As you can tell, the crossovers I’ve read mostly deal with Batman, but I’m sure there are other teamups where the exact mechanism of universe hopping isn’t explained. And I already know about the explanation in Marvel vs. DC, but it still doesn’t explain how the Joker recognized Spiderman from their previous (presumably trans-universal) encounter.
Thanks for responding, I thought this thread had died stillborne.
The cross-overs each take place in an alternate universe from the core Marvel and DC Universes. Marvel just calls these parallel universes, and explored them chiefly in What If, although there are presently at least three Marvel universes with ongoing storylines for Marvel (the core universe, Ultimate, and Extreme).
Pre-crisis DC just called these stories “imaginary stories”, but more recently has taken to calling them “Elseworlds” (which is strange, given that they eliminated all of the parallel universes in the Crisis) and they like to do strange things with the JLA in them.
Then there are the Amalgam Universe, which grew out of the Marvel vs. DC miniseries, and the Stan Lee DC Universe. Not to mention the aborted attempts to create whole new universes from scratch in the late 80’s or early 90’s; Marvel called theirs “New Universe”, and DC’s was call Impact. I liked the Impact titles a bit more, particularly The Fly.
There are a HELLUVA lot of reference in Kingdom Come. There was a whole 5 page article in Wizard magazine detailing the dozens of references that Alex Ross crammed into it.
Alternate universes? What a freaking cop-out. What happened to the New Universe after The War, anyway? In fact, how did The War end in the first place?
How “The War” ended: Everybody (the U.S., the Soviets, the Cubans, the South Africans, and everybody else) launched their nukes. They were all duds. The Starchild came back, admitted that he’d deactivated all the bombs, and telepathically commanded everybody on the planet to be good to each other or he would come back and kick some serious ass.
Also, if you read The Draft you know that Keith (Nightmask) Remsen gave a psychological all-clear on Harlan (Blowout) Mook because he (Remsen) was having trouble controlling his Nightmask persona and thought that the madness he experienced in Mook’s psyche was Nightmask, not Mook himself. So anyway, when Mook started killing people, Remsen was wracked with guilt. He lured Mook out onto a battleship and assassinated him in cold blood. This drove him all the way over the edge, and in the last few pages of the book he was shown strapped to a hospital bed, tormented by dozens of dream-projections of Mook.
I understand various New Universe folk showed up in some mainline Marvel titles (including Quasar) later, but I haven’t read them so I don’t know what happened. But The War was the last official New U project.
During the Beirbaum-Giffen run on the Legion of Super-Heroes title, obscure references became the order of the day…boy, were those fun to track down. My favorite, though, was in issue # 11, where Tenzil Kem (the former Matter-Eater Lad) goes to Earth (then off-limits to ex-Legionnaires) under the pretext of doing a TV show on archaeology. He proceeds to orate about the “Titan Presidents of Bismoll”, showing behind him archaeologists retrieving an “Abraham Lincoln manhole cover” and a “Dan Quayle Doormat”, the sizes of which “prove” that the presidents of antiquity were giants, and a dinosaur, which “proved” that they dated from prehistoric times. The man in charge of the dig was identified as “Professor Bob Finger.”
Of course, we comics fans recognize the giant penny, giant Joker card and the dinosaur as having once been on display in the Batcave…and the name of that archaeologist as a composite of the names of Batman’s two creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger.
Thanks Cliffy, I’d always wondered about that. What a lousy deus ex machina ending. By the way, I think Quasar had some adventures with whatsisname’s Antibodies from DP-7.
In a related vein, one issue of Transformers: Generation 2 had the Autobots visiting a planet that was destroyed by a hellacious attack. In the first splash page of the comic is the interior of a wrecked building, and among the debris are the remains of Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, and a human skeleton…