Yes, I am late to the party that I pushed the premiere of this blog specifically to do. Real life interferes, and every time I get back to this, there are more masses of content to filter through. My goal here is to point out the best (and a couple of the worst, just for snarking practice) of the obvious Marvel/Disney mashups that came from the minds of various online sources. And besides, this is closer to the time I really intended to start this…

Writing up a list of ideas is a lot easier than drawing them, so everyone from MTV.com (okay but obvious) to the Washington Post (except for the pun-derful “Fantasia Four”, kinda lame) to Kotaku (extra lame, and shouldn’t it’s sister blog io9 be doing this?) to Blast Magazine (never heard of them before, but less lame than most) to Firefox News (Firewhowhat? still lame and kinda depressing too) to the Woot! Blog (stick to funny sales pitches, please), with Chicago Now (not now, dear) taking it a step further to Disney-Marvel Hookups, as if relationships in fictionalized universes aren’t already tough enough.

So it’s fairly clear that the good Disney/Marvel mashups are going to be graphically based, and when I saw that Worth1000 was doing a photoshop contest on the theme, I thought ‘game over, I can do this with one link’. But as skillful as W1K’s members are, most of them didn’t quite capture the essence of the characters – or most of the obvious puns. In fact, some of the best mashups pre-date the announcement of the merger, some by decades; after all, Disney + Comic Book Superhero has long been a formula for fun. Like this version of Mickey Mouse done by Marvel veteran Jack Kirby for Craig Yoe’s 1991 book The Art of Mickey Mouse

This is as good a time and place to note my policy on reproducing others’ artwork: I’ll only post them in a reduced size and/or cropped format and link to the site where I found them wherever possible. So click on the pic if you want to see it full-size, and if you see something here that shouldn’t be here… email your ‘take it DOWN’ request to webster@oneswellfoop.net with proof you have the right and I’ll lose the pic and leave the link. Reasonable? I hope so.

Of course, Mickey is going to get mashed-up far more than any other Disney property, and Spider-Man more than anything from Marvel, so there are a lot of Spider-Mouses running around.

An interestingly varied assortment of looks, but the best conceptual representation, riffing on one of the most iconic Spider-Man scenes, was done by webcomicker R.J. Milholland (spoiler alert: this is the final panel of eight in his 8/31 comic, but the joke should be obvious from panel one)

Mickey/Wolverine mashups are also rather obvious, if a bit unpronounceable. ( Mouserine? Wolviemickey?)

What about something a little more Wolvie than Mickey?

The most quick-and-dirty way to symbolize the Disnification of Marvel is to slap a set of Mickey ears on a superhero, and Wolvie seems to have gotten that treatment more often than anyone else.
(And if webcomickers have done particularly well interpreting this topic – as you will see more examples of later – editorial cartoonists haven’t, as shown in this rundown at Comics Alliance)

There are plenty of other superhero Mickeys, mostly Iron Mouse or Captain Amickeymouse, and mostly undistinguished, but why does the ubiquitous rodent always have to be a good guy?

And why should the Mouse have all the fun (which is something you’d expect Donald Duck to say)

And you know I’d love the punnery behind M.O.D.U.C.K. (and here we have either Donald M.O.D.U.C.K. or Scrooge M.O.D.U.C.K.)

And finally, we make our first move from visual mashups to crossovers, as Donald meets Howard…

Of course, we have more from ‘The Goof’ than just being a casualty in drag. The ‘Goofy as Thor’ meme shows up frequently and rather boringly, but nothing can beat the image of Gooflactus…

The star of Disney’s first feature-length cartoon and first of the “Disney Princesses” is represented by the mutant Snow Storm and what I can only call ‘Snow Green’.

Speaking of the ol’ Hulkster (and I don’t mean the wrestler… is he still using that name? Disney’s lawyers will put a stop to that…), it’s worth remembering that the Big D owns the rights to the Muppets, so Kermit can get some help explaing that it is SO not easy being green…

Another common theme in these mashups is having Belle of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ hooking up with Marvel’s biggest and ugliest characters…

But waitaminute… Marvel has its own character known as Beast in the X-Managerie… where is he? Well, the astute comickers at Penny Arcade have an explanation for that…

With some of the most successful features from both Disney and Pixar being set undersea, there seems to be no shortage of new opportunities for the Sub-Mariner…

Some concepts work on so many levels that I can accept an unfinished sketch… like Stitch (of Lilo &) as the Silver Surfer…

And some puns are so awesomely groan-a-rific that nothing else matters.

And while these images may not be the best by any standard, I must include them only to raise the question: what is it about Disney Channel’s teen stars that scream out “MUTANT?” (High School Mutant Call and Hannah Mutana)

And somewhere in the outer reaches of Disney’s far flung collection of creative properties, there exist concepts like these…

Finally (and I mean it this time), I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of good concepts using Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters. Casting that silly willy old bear as The Thing or The Punisher are what I consider abuse of irony. But, with the addition of one strategically placed letter, one of Spider-Man’s iconic moments gets, well, seriously reframed…