STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE

 In my essay PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2, I reversed myself on the determination as to whether "spinoff" characters who didn't get their own features in a timely fashion could be deemed "proto crossovers." In the case of Marvel's Black Panther, I decided that the period separating the Panther's introduction in 1965 and his joining an ensemble-team in 1968 did not invalidate either his first appearance or all appearances in between from proto crossover status. Since all of the Panther's appearances indicate that editor Stan Lee was trying to find some way to work the character into a regular berth, through the Panther's guest-shots in FANTASTIC FOUR and CAPTAIN AMERICA, that counts as an "intent toward centricity" in a major way.

However, it's a little harder to draw as straight a line with many other characters. Also spawned in the pages of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the character called "Him." This artificially created man-god disappeared after two 1967 issues of the FF comic, with no suggestion that he had any special destiny to work out (unlike the Panther in FF). Him didn't show up again until two years later, in THOR #165-166, wherein the character battled the Thunder God for the hand of Lady Sif. The end of that story, too, did not suggest that he was going on to any feature-status, either alone or in an ensemble.

So there's no clear indication that either Lee or Kirby had any particular intent to give Him starring-status. Kirby's main focus was on using his original story to dispute a philosophical point, but having done that, there's no strong sense in the THOR story that the King saw Him as anything but a convenient menace for a one-off tale. Since it was editor Stan Lee's job to keep his eyes peeled for promising franchises, and since he'd already made a few efforts to conceive of a spin-off series for the not dissimilar FF-character The Silver Surfer, Lee might have mulled over the possibility of using Him somewhere, but never really pursued it. Yet as Marvel fandom knows, Him was duly given a face-lift by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, and rechristened with the more marketable name of Warlock, in 1972.

So five years expired before Him graduated from a Sub to a Prime, with no real evidence in between that anyone meant to spin the Original Orange Man off into his own feature. On the basis of that apparent lack of intent, I would tend to say that those five years are enough to invalidate Him's original appearances as "proto-crossovers." He's just a Sub character who's eventually given Prime stature long after his debut, simply because someone conceived of a way to rework the original concept. One may see a parallel to the television character Frasier Crane. In all the years that Frasier was a support-character on the series CHEERS, I saw no effort by the writers to suggest that they might want to spin him off until CHEERS came to an end, and the writers realized that the character of Frasier could sustain his own series. So both Warlock and Frasier Crane are at best null-crossovers.

Are there exceptions to my five-year "statute of stature limitations?" Probably, and I'll record them as I think of them. I tend to think that charisma of support-characters is even more limited. I've mentioned that in the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN the teamup of The Enforcers and The Green Goblin counts as a proto-crossover, because the Goblin was clearly intended to be a major continuing villain. Yet the later interaction of competing villains Green Goblin and Crime-Master was a null-crossover, because in his one and only story, the Crime-Master is killed and never comes back, meaning that he was never intended to be a regular recurring Spider-foe. But it's not necessary to kill off a character to show lack of authorial intent. 

A minor villain-mashup appears in BATMAN #62 (1950), wherein established villain Catwoman interacts with new crook-on-the-block Mister X. Had Mister X made even one more appearance in the BATMAN series, his appearance with Catwoman would have been a "proto"-- but since he never appeared again, X comes up "null." Note: any Bat-mavens reading this will remember that this 1950 opus is the one where Catwoman temporarily reforms. However, this has little effect on her overall persona, since she starts out the story in villain-mode and in future stories drops her uninteresting pose of "good girl" pretty quickly.

However, I wouldn't set any statute of limitations on charisma-crossovers resulting from the cross-alignment of Sub characters showing up in the "universes" of Primes wherein those Subs did not originally appear. A particularly nugatory character is the 1962 ANT MAN villain, The Hijacker, who was so lame that no one bothered to even reference his existence for the next fifteen years. Then it would appear that Bill Mantlo, desiring a forgettable villain for a toss-off issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, revived him to fight The Thing and Black Goliath in 1977. Lame though The Hijacker was, he still counts as an Ant-Man villain, and whatever little charisma he had does get somewhat enhanced by his meeting with one major Marvel hero and one bush-leaguer (who at least had his own short-lived series).