This is a book that I've seen numerous times online, having been purchased by others. Yet, I never once found it in the wild. Man, would such posts make me jealous! So you can be sure when I finally did get a chance to buy a copy, I promptly declared it was mine and added it to my pull pile.
This X-Men/New Teen Titans crossover continues the Phoenix Saga. But the main baddie chosen for this story is one that just seems unlikely. Darkseid, in yet another attempt to bring his Anti-Life Equation to fruition, has traded some powerful tech with the morally ambiguous Metron. Yet, up until 1982, when this book was published, the New Gods of Apokolips were never considered to be major foes of the Teen Titans. Yes, Deathstroke, the Terminator is involved in this plot. But he's a hired hand of Darkseid's and not the mastermind behind everything. I guess writer Chris Claremont (X-Men Vs. Dracula) really needed a powerful villain in order to bring Jean Grey back from the dead.
That resurrection isn't a spoiler. You can see that Dark Phoenix has returned on the cover! The real mystery that I won't spoil, is whether or not the entity that has returned is Jean Grey or not.
The most interesting thing about this story was how both the X-Men and Teen Titans exist in the same universe. I was expecting some sort of inter-dimensional tear in the fabric of reality bringing the two biggest sellers of DC and Marvel together. But I had forgotten that Superman and Spider-Man were a part of the same shared universe in their crossovers in the 1970s.
It would be a dozen years before DC and Marvel would produce another crossover. The 90s were full of them because Marvel was close to folding and needed the sales boost such epic meetings brought with them. Nowadays, the Marvel and DC universes seem as far apart as the East is from the West. But I know in my heart that the boundary between both worlds is separated by the mere width of a single page.
Featuring art by Walt Simonson (Fantastic Four) with inks by Terry Austin and a roster of over a dozen A-list characters, this epic was a true all-star event. Considering how beloved this book was and the fact that a reprint was issued in the mid-90s, I can't believe that it took me over 40 years to find my copy! Was it worth the wait? Visually- yes! But the story gets a little busy and Claremont really tries too tug too tight on the heart strings with Scott Summers in terms of the return of the Dark Phoenix. That overtly soap opera feel of the Uncanny X-Men is what put me off that series after a while and the book's ending sure does get soapy... I mean sappy.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.
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