Comics Twitter can be an interesting place, and earlier today it revealed a secret that most fans probably never knew: Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, the creative team behind the best-selling Marvels miniseries, almost made a Superman/Star Wars crossover.
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The revelation came after comics artist Phil Hester suggested that fans should ask their favorite creators about their “favorite rejected pitch” when talking with them at comic book conventions.
“On another front, Alex Ross and I were geared up to do Superman/Star Wars,” Busiek tweeted, “but the corporate parties involved couldn’t agree on how to divvy up the money. That’s not exactly a rejection, but it is a dead project.”
Given that Marvel has expressed disinterest in recent years in crossing over with other publishers, it seems likely any such negotiations would have happened during the years while Star Wars was at Dark Horse Comics, who published crossovers between Superman and the Aliens franchise, among others. A number of DC/Dark Horse crossover trade paperbacks have recently been made available, reprinting many of those stories for the first time.
DC continues to cross over with mid-sized publishers, but it has been several years since the “big two” last shared characters. The official line is that revenue sharing is too difficult to negotiate, although fans often believe there is bad blood between some of the management at the publishers.
Marvel acquired the Star Wars license in 2015, shortly after Disney (Marvel’s parent company) acquired Lucasfilm, which produces Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. A line of Star Wars-related titles has been a big success for Marvel, and have provided the publishing line with stability in light of a recent sales downturn, but Marvel has not expressed any interest in crossing Star Wars over with any other property, even its own.
The only significant Star Wars crossovers have been with Soul Calibur (wherein Vader, a hidden character in the game, appeared but it took place in the game’s world, not that of Star Wars) and a short story wherein Han Solo’s remains are found inside the crashed Millennium Falcon by archaeologist Indiana Jones, who is searching for a sasquatch that turns out to be Chewbacca.
Yes, really. Star Wars Tales #19; check it out.
