I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love crossovers. Comic Fury recently completed another of its fantastic multi-participant crossover exchanges, in which – as usual – I took part. Being October, the exchange was centred around Halloween, with the added theme-bonus of ‘Old movies’. We could interpret this in any way we wanted: our characters could be watching a cheesy horror or sci-fi movie, acting in a recreation of said movie, having monsters, ghosts and ghoulies run amok through their world, go trick or treating as classic movie icons…. Whatever. This time around, Cosmos got to cross over with the brilliant fantasy saga Serpents of Old, crafted by an enthusiastic lady from California who posts under the name of ‘HeSerpenty’:
http://serpentsofold.thecomicseries.com/archive
Clicked on the link yet? Well, you better have.
I will admit, when I first got the assignment, I was utterly stumped as to what story to do. How on Earth was I to link the faux-meideval world of Serpents with the sci-fi-ish contemporaneity of Cosmos; let alone have the characters interact through some sort of a movie theme? But then the lightbulb moment dawned: “Hang on…. the SoO cast are all serpent-creatures in human form…. and the main character can still revert to serpent form…. and if I stuck him on a film set and had him stomp on cardboard buildings….”
Sadly, the story pretty much wrote itself from there:
Given that it was a tale-within-a-tale, I gave myself four pages (rather than my usual three) to properly fit everything in…. plus cram in every Japanese monster movie trope and in-joke I could think of. The ‘black-and-white film’ in the movie sequence; the Toho log rip-off, sorry, ‘homage’; the blatantly-visible wires on the fighter jets; the zipper on the Anti-Monster Squad’s secret weapon….
And i must have done something right, because the response to my comic was overwhelmingly positive. Normally, when someone does a multi-page story, people leave an overall comment on the final page only – but with mine, each of the four pages had their own set of comments; left as people read one page, almost died laughing, and raced onto the next. It was a great feeling, I have to say, knowing that I had provided my fellow Comic Furians with such laudable entertainment!
Now I just have to figure out what to do for the Christmas Crossover Exchange….
When Nonsense Collides! 