Every week, I will spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories (basically, we're talking lots and lots of Silver Age comic books). Here is the archive of all the installments of this feature. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

Today we look at the time that ALF crossed over with the Marvel Universe during one of their annual summer crossovers.

In 1988, Marvel had the first of two company-wide crossovers that took place in Marvel's Annuals for that year (they kept the Annual crossovers going for a few more years, but they made the crossovers much smaller in scope, so it would be just the Avengers titles crossing over with each other or just the X-Men titles, etc.). It was called The Evolutionary War.

Oddly enough, the ALF Annual for 1988 had the same trade dress as the other Marvel Annuals...



Most folks I'm sure just presumed that this was a joke. And, in a way, that's true. However, the joke went much further than just the cover.

As a quick refresher, ALF is the story of an alien who crashes on Earth and ends up staying with a suburban family. Of course they have to make sure to hide him from the rest of the world since he is, you know, an alien.

Anyhow, the TV series was popular enough that Marvel did a comic book based on it (counting one-shots, there were more than FIFTY issues of ALF!). The 1988 Annual was written by Michael Gallagher with art by Dave Manak and Marie Severin.

In the fifth ALF story in the volume, the young boy in the family (ALF's best friend) goes to camp. ALF mistakenly thinks that it is a bad place (he thinks it is basically Stalag 17) so he tries to rescue young Brian. On the way to the camp (he's mailed himself with a Fed-Ex like company) he is contacted by none other than the High Evolutionary!!!





The crossover continues with the final story in the volume...





Very cute stuff.

If YOU have a suggestion for a story for this feature, e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com