Who would win?

Darth Vader vs. Voldemort. Sauron vs. Voldemort. Batman vs. Spiderman. Dracula vs. the Wolfman.

The adolescent imagination is filled with these sort of pairings. What would happen if you threw a hero or villain from one imaginary construct against an opponent from a different construct? The Grinwout has sat on long bus rides with high school debaters who can conduct a conversation along these lines for upwards of five hours. This is why the Grinwout has noice-reducing headphones.

But the idea of mixing and matching is not a new one. Universal Studios did all the early horror movies like Frankenstein and Dracula and The Invisible Man, and after they exhausted all the possibilities of return, revenge, son of, bride of, mother-in-law of, etc., they went to mixing them up against one another. The natural outcome of this was that teams of what were once collective nightmares found themselves in battle with Abbot and Costello, and losing. It was not a pretty sight. Then again, when I was in fifth grade, House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, where the monsters were so numerous they had to take a number, were the hit of the playground.

The issue is the imaginary construct. As Stephen Padnick explains at Tor.com, some characters exist in their own singular construct, especially in movies:

Crossovers don’t really happen in films, outside the horror genre... The protagonists of long running film series rarely meet either. James Bond never hit on Sarah Conner to the disgust of her son. Indiana Jones did not team up with Rick Blaine to punch out Nazis while Marion Ravenwood drunkenly sang Marseilles, (though how cool would it be if they did?). Even superhero movies, which are almost as old as superhero comics, basically assume that their hero is the only superhero in the world, and their superhero origin is the only source of supernatural power.

This is not the case in comics, where all the characters exist in the same universe, and cross over all the time. Which is why we have the Justice League and the Avengers. In fact, each individual comic nowadays is simply one episode of the narrative that crosses all the comics of a particular publisher. I recently was checking out a Green Lantern narrative on my iPad that, if I were to have purchased it, would have covered dozens of comics across multiple venues, and it took about three spreadsheets and an extra can of Red Bull to even begin to figure it out.

Inspired by the upcoming Avengers movie, the first to provide celluloid crossover, Padnick parses it out in The Avengers, the Argonauts, and the History of the Team-Up.