In "Our Lives Together," I spotlight some of the more interesting examples of shared comic book universes. You know, crossovers that aren't exactly crossovers.

Today, we look at how David Michelinie connected his three disparate DC comics series together in the late 1970s...right before the final one of the three books ended!

I wrote recently about David Michelinie's late 1970s comic book series, Star Hunters, and how Michelinie was driven to quit the book (and DC entirely) over a conflict regarding a design for a ship between swiped from a then-current cartoon series.

However, there is another interesting bit in Michelinie's final issue of Star Hunters that served to actually tie together all three of Michelinie's "out of the box" comic book series from DC during that period.

You see, in the mid-1970s, DC launched what they called the DC Explosion, an attempt to diversify their comic book line with sword and sorcery and science fiction titles on top of their superhero comics, mystery/horror and romance comics...

Michelinie helped launch Claw the Unconquered in this initial lineup of books...

He then also launched the futuristic sword title, Starfire, the next year...

And then the science fiction adventure, Star Hunters, the following year...

In the third issue of Star Hunters, the captain of the crew that the series followed, Donovan Flint, was seemingly killed in an explosion...

In the next issue, though, we see that he was saved by some sort of cosmic being...

It was not until Star Hunters #7, Michelinie's final issue, that we see that this cosmic being was actually connected to the Multiverse and thus chose Donovan as its LATEST champion, but it had OTHER champions, and they were, of course, Claw and Starfire!

Isn't that a neat way to connect the three titles?

Of course, since Michelinie left the series, the connection was never fully explored. The series was going to continue under Gerry Conway, but then DC suffered what was called the "DC Implosion" and many of their titles were canceled abruptly, including Star Hunters.

If you have a suggestion for another clever piece of shared continuity, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!