Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and fifty-third week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
As we've been doing it for some time now, one legend today, one tomorrow and one Sunday.
Let's begin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Brian Michael Bendis tried to do a Batman/Daredevil crossover over a decade ago.
STATUS:
True
I won't front, I was doing an article the other day about Brian Michael Bendis' only other comic book that he ever wrote for DC Comics and I was planning on mentioning the planned Batman crossover that he wanted to do with Daredevil (I even accidentally left it in the description on Facebook for a few minutes before I fixed it), but the piece was already getting kind of long and I thought, "Wait, have I seriously never featured that story as a Comic Book Legend? For serious?" So here we are!
In other words, yes, back in 2003, Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Avon Oeming (Bendis' collaborator on Powers) discussed doing a crossover between Batman and Daredevil. It did not come about because DC was not interested, despite having been then currently doing a JLA/Avengers crossover at the time...
Here are unrelated (but awesome) Oeming drawings of Daredevil and Batman....
And here's a beautiful watercolor team-up painting of the pair by Alex Maleev (since Maleev had worked on both characters at the time, I used two drawings of his as the featured image of this piece)...
The whole incident was recounted by Bendis at a Chicago convention in 2004 and CBR was there to cover it! Seth Jones recounted the event, where Bendis told the crowd the following of the proposed crossover:
“This is a weird thing to talk about publicly,” Bendis started. “A year ago, Michael Avon Oeming and I started talking about a big Batman/Daredevil crossover. At the time, (Quesada) told me to put it on the back burner, because of the climate between the two companies. This was perplexing to me, as JLA/Avengers was making a boatload of dough.”
Bendis continued, “So this year, me and Ed Brubaker started talking about it. Batman versus Bullseye. Elektra versus Catwoman. Yeah, a lot of cool shit. Everyone was excited, a lot of people said they’d do it for free — let’s just get this shit done, let’s get it green-lit. But (DC President, Publisher) Paul Levitz said no.”
Then, amazingly enough, DC Comics' Bob Wayne showed up at the panel to dispute Bendis' version of events, by noting that the issue was a 2002 spotlight of Joe Quesada in an article in the New York Observer, and in the piece, Quesada noted that he preferred it when DC and Marvel were at odds with each other. He also added, "“What the f**k is DC anyway? They’d be better off calling it AOL Comics. At least people know what AOL is. I mean, they have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them. That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the f**k?”
Wayne intimated that the issue was DC wasn't willing to do the project with Quesada.
You can read the whole thing here.
Still, the basic gist of it is that yes, Brian Michael Bendis tried to get a Batman/Daredevil crossover done and it just didn't happen.
Maybe 2018 is the year it will get done! How cool would that be?
Thanks to Seth Jones and Brian Michael Bendis for the information! Someone on Facebook brought the article up the other day in my buddy John Trumbull's Facebook page and I thought that that was funny, since it was precisely the article I was planning on using for this legend. Serendipity!
Check out some legends from Legends Revealed:
Did No One Guess the Right Answer in The Simpsons’ “Who Shot Mr. Burns” Contest?
Did a Play About Daniel Boone Invent the Fiction That he Wore Coonskin Caps?
Were the Foo Fighters Originally the FooD Fighters?
Check back Saturday for part 2 of this week's legends!
And remember, if you have a legend that you're curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!