over which company has produced the superior characters is the source of infinite nerd conflict, even more hotly contested than the “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” discussions. And given how protective Marvel and DC are about their characters, it was a rare event indeed if they ever crossed over.
It happened from time to time, of course. Old-school comics nerds will recall the first 1976 crossover event “Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man: The Battle of the Century,” wherein the DC and Marvel heroes got into a brief scuffle. There are no parallel universe shenanigans in that comic. Superman and Spider-Man are seen to simply be living on the same Earth. The fight between the characters is evened by a high-tech radiation ray that weakens Superman slightly, but strengthens Spider-Man considerably. And that was just the first superhero crossover. Every few years or so, another event would pop up, and comic book nerds would learn, say, if the Hulk could beat up Superman, etc.
But the very first collab between the companies came in 1975 over a very strange and hotly contested project. Both companies, it seems, were working on simultaneous comic adaptations of MGM’s 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.” But rather than one company ceding the project to the other, however, they ended up joining forces. The result was an 84-page mega comic called “MGM’s Marvelous Wizard of Oz.”
The story was told in a 1987 issue of The Baum Bugle, handily archived by the Oz Club.
