CROSSOVER MADNESS

 I didn't expect to find a crossover while buzzing through a 1976 HOT STUFF but here's the Little Devil saving Jack Frost from the villainous Iceman in "The Deep Freeze Mystery" (HS #137).

   

NULL-CROSSOVERS #21

 I devoted one post here to an installment of the silly time-travel series from JUMBO COMICS, "Stuart Taylor," in which Taylor and company went back in time to encounter the characters of Washington Irving's purely fictional story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." But hey, maybe in Taylor's universe. Sleepy Hollow was real.

    In the case of the Taylor story from JUMBO #53, however, here we have a null-crossover, despite the writer's use of the legendary folkloric name of Bluebeard. At least the Sleepy Hollow story got most of the details of the original tale right. Here it looks like the writer and/or artist decided to whack out a story of Taylor's group traveling back to ancient Persia and fighting against a potentate who wants to get jiggy with Taylor's gal-pal. I don't have a problem with the creators depicting the French Bluebeard as Persian, because the Wiki article on Bluebeard mentions that sometimes European artists drew the character as vaguely Turkish, in keeping with a craze for Orientalism. But the Taylor tale makes no attempt to emulate any trope of the dominant Bluebeard story, so I tend to think the makers just hacked out a standard tale and stuck the Bluebeard name on it. In the same Wiki-article Victorian writer Andrew Lang pointed out that there was no good reason in the story to imagine Bluebeard as a Muslim, for Muslims of the time, unlike Christians, were allowed more than a single wife at a time. Indeed, the Taylor tale imagines "Bluebeard" trying to add the modern female to his harem. So this is a case where the use of a famous name by itself carries no true crossover-vibe.         

RAR #94: JAMES HIGHWATER

 In the Grant Morrison ANIMAL MAN run, James Highwater is an anthropologist who helps the hero undergo a "vision quest," though he's not a standard "mystical Indian" in any way.

MONSTER MASHUPS #140

 THE FLAME FISH.

THE BATWING PELICAN.

THE LIGHTNING EEL.

THE SEA MONSTER and THE LOBSTER SHARK.