Linkara, the host of the long-running comic book review webseries Atop the Fourth Wall, tackled one of the most-anticipated comics of all time in this week’s episode: JLA/Avengers.
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The review, one of the first in Linkara’s tenth-anniversary year, was selected by one of the show’s Patreon sponsors.
Besides appearing in a number of the Channel Awesome movies (which bring together characters like the Nostalgia Critic, Angry Video Game Nerd, and others also distributed through the website), Lovhaug crowdfunded and directed an Atop the Fourth Wall movie in 2015.
Over the years, as the show was popularized, Lovhaug launched a Patreon and now does a handful of episodes every year dedicated to reviews dictated by Patreon sponsors who contribute at a certain level. Those episodes tend to be for trade paperbacks, movies, TV shows, anime, or other pieces of comics-adjacent art that Lovhaug would not ordinarily review.
…Oh, or comics that don’t suck, which are a nice respite for Linkara and a different source of comedy (since at its heart, Atop the Fourth Wall is still fairly joke-driven).
It is not the first time Linkara has looked at an inter-company crossover — or even one between Marvel and DC, as he reviewed Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man, the first-ever crossover between Marvel and DC.
Of course, JLA/Avengers was the final such crossover, with the companies never managing to get another one together.
JLA/Avengers itself fell apart once before: in the early ’80s, there was an attempt at a Justice League of America/Avengers crossover by Gerry Conway and George Perez. The project was outlined and some art even created, but a disagreement with Marvel editorial meant that it never happened.
Years later, the series was written by the fan-favorite Avengers creative team of Kurt Busiek and Perez.
One has to assume that, sooner or later, Linkara will get around to doing the actual Marvel vs. DC/DC vs. Marvel miniseries that Ron Marz, Dan Jurgens, Peter David, and Claudio Castellini. Not yet, but…well, let’s just say that if you’ve seen his “Miller Time” series, you know Linkara is pretty good at playing these things out over a longer period of time.
While Linkara sometimes does entire miniseries or crossover events in a single episode, the first episode contained too much backstory, too many subplots, and ultimately too much content, with the episode ending at the end of the minseries’ second half and a note that Linkara would finish the review and render his final verdict on the event-to-end-all-events in a second video.
