This Week in Anime

What Is This, An Anime Crossover Episode?

Chris
Lucas, I had fun chatting with Steve about all those DC Comics anime last week, but I just realized we completely missed something! Big Western comic publishers like them are known for their constant crossover events, bringing characters together from all over the multiverse! I guess it's an element we don't need to worry about too much, though; it's not like you're going to see someone like Superman stumbling into Dragon Ball anytime soon—

This is what happens when you get off on the technicality of not being a crossover with an official character but rather Toriyama's own parody. But that's still fine because while some may think that crossovers are intended to settle age-old power scaling arguments, that just isn't the case. The real reason is to see characters who operate on entirely different rulesets have to deal with each other's bullshit.

It's easy to understand why it feels less likely. Manga, and the anime based on them, are known in popular culture for being singular works of particular authors, so that kind of driving vision would theoretically be free of marketing-mandated World's Finest-style team-ups. But then you remember that many of these are still run by massive publishing, broadcasting, and licensing companies, and suddenly you recall that they did a whole One Piece episode crossing over with Dragon Ball and Toriko.

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn't have near the worldwide cultural cache.

This is neither the time nor the place to meditate on the fact that this isn't even the only time Oda's been involved in that sort of maneuver. Fortunately, crossovers can be viewed in far less morally misgiving contexts when authors are just doing it by themselves!

Per my opening with Suppaman from Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump popping up in Dragon Ball; this tends to be the most common kind of anime guest appearance: characters from an author's other works crashing their current series' party.

I think calling every one of those "big hits" would be stretching it, but it's still cool to see someone who's been going that long being happy to interface with their whole body of work. Granted, I'm unfamiliar enough with any of Mashima's series, and just bumping into one of these crossovers while I was reading the other might lose me a bit. But I'm sure it's quite rewarding in context if you are up on the full canon.

Sometimes, an author who's been going a while can use the concept of a crossover to surprise back-port in world-building. Speaking of authors we've fallen off of, as someone for whom Love Hina was a formative way of getting into manga (shut up), I got really into reading Ken Akamatsu's follow-up series, Negima! as it was releasing. So it was pretty neat when a new secondary character in that manga turned out to be the younger sister of Love Hina's Naru, indicating the two series had been taking place in the same universe all along!

For added nerdery, this was a character who was barely glimpsed in the original Love Hina manga and only put in real appearances in its anime adaptation, making Mei's appearance in Negima! something of a crossover between mediums as well.

You can chart a line in places where a series going from a fun crossover inclusion to a complete 'verse sort of overtakes the entertainment value of the guest appearances. Akamatsu would roll with the idea whole-hog into his next series UQ Holder!, to the point that it wasn't so much a continuing crossover as much as just Negima!'s Boruto.


That probably resulted in some oddness for non-superfans when UQ Holder! got an anime adaptation despite the relevant parts of Negima! never having been animated, but then that would require anybody caring about the anime version of UQ Holder! in the first place. So it can be argued there are diminishing returns to this sort of thing, and sticking with incidental one-or-two-off crossovers is for the best.

Look, if your genre was omnipresent for any amount of time, then you've probably got a full deck of cards you can scatter around for a game of crossover 52 Pickup. That's why DC was able to start throwing their superheroes into each other's books, and it's why Isekai Quartet isn't the first chibi tribute to multiverse madness.

See, the beauty of the comedy crossover cavalcade is that you can do it with just about anything. Including the depressing Key series, as seen in Kaginado.

The long-running investment in games lets them build up a big collection of action figures they can smash together. Similar to Key, visual novel maker Type-Moon has done a similar comedy crossover in Carnival Phantasm.

If you thought something like the Mashima crossovers or UQ Holder! was obtuse, then know that this stuff is downright impenetrable to anybody not up on decades of lore and fandom in-jokes. Which is why it's nice when you've got stuff like Type-Moon's Fate/Grand Order or that World of Final Fantasy that are at least accessible as neat games you can play through. To say nothing of entries like Jump Ultimate Stars that let players arrange dream matches between characters like Goku and Luffy, who kicked off this whole discussion.

I'm sure the game has its fans, but one of the tricks with crossing over characters from different artists is massaging the art styles together, and these Unreal Engine horrors probably weren't the best way to go. Still, the sheer number of these centered around Jump solidifies Shueisha's magazine's chokehold on culture. At least even people who don't like Jump Force still remember it enough to dunk on it. That's better than something like the totally forgotten PSP fighter Sunday VS Magazine, which ought to have been the CAPCOM VS SNK of manga magazine crossovers. Alas.

Though, hey, there's Negima! again. And Fairy Tail too.

I mean, I feel like the energy is there properly, at least. It helps that Goku and Luffy aren't entirely dissimilar characters. That's still not on the level of Shin-chan just wandering onto the set of Wonderful Precure! a couple of months back.

If I hadn't seen it happen to know better, I'd have sworn this was a Photoshopped shitpost.

Dissonant art styles can be used in these things well if they are being done as a joke. Space Patrol Luluco, for instance, wound up bringing in a whole bunch of other Studio Trigger cameos for one of its arcs, which all meshed well enough...

...which, of course, made it even funnier when they just slotted Inferno Cop right in there. It's really fair, given that Inferno Cop's animation was always doing a bit. That's another point in the column for these kinds of stunts working better when they're creator-driven.

At the rate things are going with Takahashi remakes, we can probably expect to see a new one of those sooner rather than later. Only time will tell if Yashahime gets invited.

All this isn't to say that popular creators are the only vector for crossovers to occur. Sometimes, a property itself being popular is enough to net a guest appearance, like tossing Wolverine into a comic to help drive up sales. That's how we wind up with legends like Evangelion's Shinji or the famous Hatsune Miku popping up in Shinkalion, and making me just a little disappointed there's no streaming option here for this transforming train toy commercial show.

This isn't even Miku's wildest anime crossover appearance. There was also that time Dropkick on My Devil! X's successful crowdfunding netted her walk-on appearances that season to bully and/or get bullied by all of Jinbocho's angels and devils.

This is what you can do when your "special guest" is a piece of voice-synthesis software anybody can use.

Oh don't even get me started on my beloved Ghost-type Miku, or we'll be here all night.

Like we talked about crossovers causing consternation with their uncanny art styles? Project Voltage was the opposite of that.

It certainly lends to her ability to team up with virtually any other anime character. Though others like Lupin the Third could give her a run for her money.

That guy gets around.

It's a crossover so legendary they immortalized it in Nendoroid form.

Another fun fact is that Yoshio Sawai actually got Kazuki Takahashi himself to draw Yugi for that panel. This is a cool example of how the practice of crossovers can bring creators together.

There can easily be some cynicism to the commercial appeal of the practice, but it's still nice when a team-up seems to get everyone excited. One thing recently that got me jazzed was the announcement of a collaboration between MyGO from BanG Dream! and Togenashi Togeari from Girls Band Cry. It's one of those match-ups that seemed so natural that fans of CGI anime about angsty girl bands made jokes about it happening, and now it's real!

It's just a combo concert and not a proper anime crossover for now, but seeing the performers interact should still be fun. Most importantly, the fan artists have already started having fun with the whole idea.

It's more natural than smashing together two dissonant IPs in a mobile game collab to extort gacha money, that's for sure.

Good call. At least that's one place where it's probably best to stay on your own side of things instead of...crossing over.