Author Description

Batman and Superman. Alien and Predator. Zatoichi and Yojimbo. The Six-Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan. Hercules and Xena. Iron Man and Captain America. Team-ups have been a part of storytelling for as long as stories have been told, from Enkidu helping Gilgamesh to the coming together of the Avengers. As writers of licensed fiction, one of the most enjoyable aspects is to put together various combinations of characters that don’t always get together. But one thing we rarely get to do is team characters from different milieus. Sure, it happens sometimes—in 1998, Simon & Schuster published a Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men crossover novel, and the comics company IDW has an impressive recent history of mixing and matching some of their licensed universes—but for the most part such pairings are left to the realm of fanfiction. But what about characters who are in the public domain? The sky’s the limit there. And so we as co-editors decided to get some of our favorite tie-in writers together to see what team-ups of classic characters they could come up with. And holy cow, did they give us some great ones. Some authors went with some instantly recognizable classics: Kevin J. Anderson pairs Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster; David Mack put Shakespeare’s Prospero (along with Ariel) together with Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (along with Sancho Panza); and Derek Tyler Attico joins Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, and the folk hero John Henry. Some pairings are natural, like several from the pulp era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Captain Battle and Blackout are World War II-era comics heroes; Dan Fowler and Stinger Seave are Depression-era adventurers; Ace Harlem and Frimbo are Harlem Renaissance heroes; the Moon Man and the Man in the Black Cloak are mysterious two-fisted crime-fighters; Fantomah and Jane Trent, Scien