UPDATE: All credit to Diamond Comic Distributors on this one. I think someone there noticed that I was picking up on some stories that were running on their website, but weren't fully linked from the home page yet. Such as Marvel's marketshare in December, and lists of upcoming comic books for the next two weeks.

So it seems they laid a trap, one written to appeal to Bleeding Cool, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Diamond ran an article on their website outlining a fictitious crossover – one that has now disappeared and I have emails from Marvel Comics peeps asking if April has come early…

Well played, Diamond, well played. Do I detect the influence of Bob Wayne in this one at all?

You may all begin the collective mocking… now.

The original article appears below. It is based on a fabrication.

In April, Marvel and DC will publish a new twelve issue series, Spider-Man/Batman.



In the manner of John Byrne's Superman/Batman Generations series which showed the careers on Batman and Superman in real time over the decades, Spider-Man/Batman will chronicle the many meeting of the pair through their respective careers as superhero crime fighters. The first issue, 48 pages long, will show the very first meeting between Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne, and the rest of the series will show the rest of the characters lives where they intersect.



Marvel and DC have published a number of crossovers since the original Spider-Man/Superman in the seventies. However, after the appointment of Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas as editor-in-chief and publisher of Marvel Comics, things soured considerably, specifically after a New York Observer interview in which Quesada DC was criticised for not fully exploiting characters such as Batman and Superman. The quote "What the fuck 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" caused the most distress and caused DC to call off any future DC/Marvel crossovers.

When Marvel writer Brian Bendis last postulated the possibility of a Batman/Daredevil crossover, he was shot down by DC, with now Senior VP Sales Bob Wayne seeming to suggest that as Bill Jemas had been let go by Marvel, it could only happen when Joe Quesada had been also left the company.

That hasn't happened, though Joe Quesada is now Chief Creative Officer, while ex-DC editor Axel Alonso is editor-in-chief. However, DC have undergone a major change of their own – brought on in part by the criticism within Warners that DC wasn't exploiting its properties to their maximum.



So now, just in time for the new Batman and Spider-Man movies, we get another Spider-Man/Batman, and something that could be collected into a large perrenial hardcover for 2013. And Watchmen 2.

Expect confirmation, and creative details soon, although, doesn't it feel as if Brian Bendis should be writing it? Here's a couple of covers from an earlier version, a fair few years ago…