Worlds Collide: The Milestone Side, Month 2 (August 1994)
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Worlds Collide: The Milestone Side, Month 2 (August 1994)
The conclusion to our somewhat messy coverage of this crossover, but to be fair, it was kind of a messy crossover to begin with. RECAP: Worlds are colliding! Fred is getting upset! As in Fred Bentson, the seemingly omnipotent mailman who can travel between the DC Universe and Milestone's Dakotaverse and thinks he's dreaming one or both of those worlds. After being tortured by unscrupulous assholes who were trying to exploit his power, Fred turned himself into a big ugly being called Rift and threw a tantrum, with dire consequences for our heroes (and our villains)...
Hardware #18
At last, the tale of why John Henry Irons was wearing nothing but boxer shorts in Man of Steel #36 can be told! After digging themselves out of the destruction caused by Rift's little temper tantrum, Hardware and his boss/nemesis Edwin Alva (one of the assholes mentioned above) decide to contact their enemy on the DC side, Hazard (the other asshole), so they can work together to save both their worlds. After all, that's where they keep all their stuff.
Hazard suggests recruiting "an inventor of his acquaintance," meaning John/Steel, the guy his lackeys have been trying to kill in the Steel series. Steel agrees to the awkward team up. Meanwhile, Hardware recruits an enemy of his own, some teleporting lady called Transit. In other words, everyone in this comic hates each other.
Thanks to Transit, the gang is able to create an "interdimensional space between the worlds" (don't call it a Pocket Universe). Steel and Hardware get to work on a machine that can contain Rift, and after a while, John tells his lab partner that he's "absolutely brilliant" and he's learned a lot from him. Hardware is like "yes."
That's when Steel notices that Hardware is adding something to the machine that will actually kill Rift instead of just trapping him. Steel isn't willing to do that, but he is willing to kick Hardware's ass to prevent it. Unfortunately, Hardware has the advantage of being a sneaky bastard who plays dirty, so he ends up beating Steel by throwing a "nano acid" at him that eats all of the metal in John's armor. There's no metal in John's undies, though. Hence: boxers.
Despite being powerless, Steel still won't back down and says the whole reason he's a superhero is to prevent his inventions from killing people (even giant, universe-destroying ones). He eventually wears Hardware down and they agree to build a non-lethal trap for Rift... after they make John some new (metal) pants, that is.
Icon #16
After the events of Man of Steel #36, in which Rift tried to force Superman and Icon to fight in Metropolis to determine which one gets to exist in his new continuity, he transports both of them to Dakota and gives them a new deal: if Superman defeats Icon, Rift will undo Lex Luthor's actions from Action #700 and un-destroy Metropolis. He even transports Lex to Dakota for a couple of panels, just to show off his powers. I'm not clear on whether this is an illusion by Rift or if he really gave Lex his hair and body mobility back for a moment, for some reason.
And if Icon wins, Rift will un-destroy his city. Wait, when something happen to Dakota? Right after Rift said that, since he unfreezes that tsunami he'd stopped in Superboy #7 and lets it hit the city.
Now that both heroes are properly motivated, the actual fight begins (with each one thinking they'll help the other once they win). Icon knows that Superman has the upper hand, since he's more powerful and also literally Superman, so he uses the one thing he has to his advantage: his giant Image Comics-style cape.
At one point, Icon says that "Lacking either a supply of kryptonite or the raw power of Jessica Fletcher, I'm forced to resort to other means to deal with you." Is Murder, She Wrote about some sort of powerful lady warrior in the Dakotaverse? Is she still played by Angela Lansbury? I kinda wanna see that version.
Superman and Icon seem pretty even, until Rift stops the fight and says he's realized that perhaps he doesn't have to choose between one world or the other. That sounds pretty good, until we see him grabbing both planets and crashing (or, you know, colliding) them into each other. The cataclysmic results are shown in Steel #7, which is followed by...
Blood Syndicate #17
What with all the cities crashing into each other and the mass casualties and stuff, everyone forgot about the Blood Syndicate, including Rift. So, when he's musing about streamlining his new combined world's continuity and they attack him (having just learned he drowned all of their friends and families), Rift retcons that rowdy bunch into a group of obedient little boys and girls sitting in a classroom. The "obedient" part doesn't last too long, though...
Since they didn't like that corny revamp, Rift turns them into something more EXTREME: the Underappreciated Ex-Gang, a group of muscular superheroes with various ethnic accents who have sworn to protect a world that hates and underappreciates them.
The funniest part is Aquamaria, who seemingly died in Superboy #7, reappearing as a phoenix made of water and giving a dramatic speech until she remembers she doesn't speak English and says "¿Pero qué carajo estoy haciendo aquí?"
The Ex-Blood Syndicate rebels against their retcon once again, so Rift decides there's just no place for them in his continuity and turns them into metal statues, just like the ones the Legion of Super-Heroes has for dead heroes. That similarity is no coincidence, as we'll see in the next issue...
Static #14
This oversized issue serves as the climax for the crossover. Right away, we find out that Rift didn't just revamp the Blood Syndicate: he revamped the entire combined DC/Milestone universe into a futuristic utopia protected by a large group of teenage superheroes. Static (or "Static Lad" as he's called now), being a huge nerd, instantly recognizes the reference: it's all based on the classic League of Superteens comics from the '50s, of course.
(Yes, superheroes in the '90s were very concerned with their hair.)
Static, Rocket ("Rocket Gal"), and Superboy ("Fabulous Boy") don't know where the other heroes are, so Static uses his genre-saviness to find them by consulting the LoST's Mission Monitor, which shows where every member is at any moment. My favorites on the long list are "Mall Hair Girl (on patrol)," "Dough Boy III (ret-conned)," and "Procrastination Lad (late)."
The superteens are able to find everyone except Superman and Icon, because they ended up stuck in the interdimensional void with the anti-Rift trap that Steel and Hardware made. While Rift is distracted forcing the superteens to fight the statues that used to be the Blood Syndicate, the armored geniuses are able to stretch a little portal made by Transit so that Superman, Icon, and the big trap machine can come through, which looks... painful.
Superman and Icon fly the trap towards Rift, and from his perspective it looks just like the freaky nightmare monster that had been haunting him since the start of the crossover (which is a nice bit of foreshadowing). The only problem is that the trap's battery is sort of busted due to the rough trip out of the interdimensional void -- and that's where Static comes in, because this is his comic and he deserves to get the big heroic moment. Static shoots a big burst of electricity into the trap as it catches Rift, and...
We see Superman, Superboy, and Steel back in Metropolis, and everything is back to normal (meaning Metropolis is still destroyed, but at least Superboy's fade cut is back). They lament the fact that their friends in the other universe were obviously not real, while in Dakota, the Milestone heroes think the same thing about them. So, the crossover ends with every single thing that happened in it being undone... except for Rocket kissing Static, since she does it again.
The last page shows Fred Bentson floating in a black void in his pajamas, doing the one thing he wanted to do all those years: sleeping in peace.
According to the DC wiki, Fred has reappeared exactly three times since this crossover: first in Justice League of America #34 (2009) and Milestone Forever #2 (2010), which explain that a mystical dude called Dharma found Rift napping outside of reality and used his powers to stitch the Dakotaverse into the DC Universe and prevent the former's destruction. More recently, in Milestone 30th Anniversary Special (2023), a younger version of Fred appears in the current Milestone earth and causes its heroes to meet their counterparts from the original Dakotaverse, until everything is sorted out thanks to Dharma, the Statics, and the power of group therapy.
This is a weird-ass crossover, mainly due to the "big bad" being a dweeb who seems to change his motivation with every other chapter (from "just leave me alone" to "I wanna be a superhero" to "destroy one universe" to "clean up the continuity"). However, the entire point was to introduce more readers to the Milestone characters and I think it does that pretty well: you get a good sense of who everyone is and what their comic is about. If I'd had the chance as a kid I probably would have continued checking out Static and maybe Blood Syndicate, just because that "Ex-Gang" gag was pretty funny.
Anyway, hope you're not fed up with crossovers starring dozens of characters and multiple realities, because we've got a biggie coming up...
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