One of the greatest strengths of the DC Universe is its ever-evolving ability to factor in new characters and concepts from elsewhere and make them fit within its own tone and style. It’s easy to forget that characters such as Blue Beetle, Plastic Man and Shazam were once the property of rival publishers, while in recent years DC has integrated WildStorm characters like Midnighter and Apollo into its universe.

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When it was announced that the characters from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins’ Watchmen would be crossing over to the DC Universe, it was met with no small amount of skepticism. But so far, Doomsday Clock has been an intriguing look at the clash of styles between the two styles of storytelling. With the news that another Moore creation -- Tom Strong -- is going to appear in the pages of The Terrifics, it begs the question, which other characters and franchises could make their way into the DC Universe? And does Marvel have its own suitable, yet unexpected, crossover potential with which to challenge DC's?

It’s A Strange World

The nature of the WildStorm characters and their involvement in the DCU has been reduced over the course of the past year, and since the launch of Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt’s The Wild Storm, their significance in the larger DCU has been even further downplayed. However, there are a number of WildStorm characters yet to appear in either universe that would really shake-up the status-quo. Of course, the biggest ones in terms of impact and notoriety would be Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary, specifically the core team of Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, Ambrose Chase and The Drummer.

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Towards its end, Planetary was plagued by delays, with three years between its penultimate and final issues. And while it was sometimes easy to forget, its involvement with the WildStorm Universe is essential to how it works. It plays with the concept of Century Babies — people born at midnight on January 1, 1900 — which Ellis explored elsewhere in his WildStorm work, and references characters such as Jenny Sparks and The High throughout the run. Now that it’s 2018, the 21st Century Babies will be turning eighteen years old, and are also Millennium Babies, which could put a new spin on the familiar concept. It’d be the perfect time for Ellis to bring back his most optimistic and hopeful WildStorm work for a fresh spin in a new time, and to catch up with characters we haven’t seen in nearly a decade.

Even if DC didn’t bring back the core Planetary team, the twenty-seven issue series is packed full of ideas and characters that would be right at home in the DC Universe. Planetary is a love-letter to superhero comics and the mediums that preceded them, and it wouldn’t be too jarring to see Jim Wilder and his Shiftship appear in a Superman book, or for Batman to tussle with the Dead Cop of Hong Kong. Planetary is a series with so much more potential than it ever reached over the course of ten years and twenty-seven issues. With Ellis and Cassaday's blessing, the DC Universe could become a much stranger, and cooler place.

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Burn Notice

Another lauded work from the WildStorm era which hasn’t really been touched on in the intervening years is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Sleeper. The story of an undercover agent trapped in a secret society of supervillains because the only person that knows he didn’t really turn evil is in a coma is one rife with potential if transplanted to the DCU. Sleeper wasn’t the first collaboration between Brubaker and Phillips, but it was the one where they really honed their skills together and became the blockbuster creative team that would go on to give the world Criminal, Fatale and Kill or Be Killed. The two volumes of Sleeper -- plus its prequel, Point Blank -- redefined superhero espionage for the next two decades. It also showed how to take aspects from throughout a shared universe and meld them so seamlessly into your own story, people won’t realize they already existed.

While it stands on its own as a great work of superhero, sci-fi and neo-noir fiction, Sleeper is even more embedded in the WildStorm Universe than Planetary. John Lynch, the man who recruited lead-character Holden Carver into going undercover, dates back to the earliest days of the imprint, debuting in WildC.A.T.S #1, and Sleeper’s primary antagonist TAO was created by Alan Moore and Travis Charest only a couple of years later. While it might not be likely )or even possible, depending on rights issues) to bring Holden Carver back, TAO is an A-List villain just waiting to pop up and take on any number of DC superheroes.

Friendly Competition

While DC has a roster of franchises it could bring into DC Universe, Marvel isn’t wanting for some major crossover potential of its own. It’s long been rumored that one day Marvel will integrate Miracleman into its larger universe, and having just regained the rights to Conan, the publisher could plant the Cimmerian warrior in Marvel’s ancient history and have him team up with Avengers BC. Marvel also has the holy grail in Star Wars which seems far-fetched, but a DCU/Watchmen crossover seemed far-fetched once, and if the stars aligned, there’s nothing to say we couldn’t see Doctor Doom and Darth Vader share the same page.

Ultimately, it all comes down to execution when you integrate characters into a larger universe and the history of comics is littered with poor attempts at crossovers which never stuck. However, if the right story is there and there’s a creative team that genuinely cares about how it’s handled, it can seem like the most natural thing in the world. It may be controversial at times, but there’s no denying that it turns heads and boosts sales, and it’s completely understandable why a publisher would want to do that given the chance.