Crossover Corner: Batman/Elmer Fudd #1

Friend or Foe? Time travel or Space Travel? Worlds Collide or Combine? In the Crossover Corner, we look to examine the meetings of some of fiction’s greatest characters and document their encounters. Spoilers Ahead!

Characters Featured

• Batman (1939)
• Elmer Fudd (1940)
• Bugs Bunny (1940)
• Silver St. Cloud (1977)

Medium

• Comics (June 2017)

The Setup

The joys of being an one-off comic, there is no set-up here. No magical portal that transports Batman to an alternate dimension, no pretense that these are animated characters bought to life.

Instead the core basis for the comic just presumes that the Looney Tunes characters exist in the real world as humans with distinct traits pulled from their animated counterparts.

Batman is, well, Batman.

Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny enjoy a drink at Porky’s

The Meeting

Classification: Versus

Batman and Elmer Fudd’s first encounter ends with Elmer shooting Bruce Wayne. They then engage in a multiple page brawl between the two of them. While neither man is really the “winner,” it does seem like Elmer was buffed up a bit to last with the Bat.

The Story

Love is mankind’s greatest gift. It can drive you to do things you never thought possible, so when Elmer finds out the love of his life, Silver St. Cloud has been murdered, it sets him on a path of revenge. First he encounters Bugs, and after some interrogation and threat of death, he is given a name. Silver’s former lover, Bruce Wayne.

Elmer voyages to Wayne Manor and without missing a beat, shoots Bruce and exits stage left. But of course, we all know Bruce’s secret and Batman is quickly on Elmer’s tail. What follows is a surprisingly even match-up between Batman and Elmer Fudd which is a delight to see and very physical.

Their fight comes to a head when they realize they are being played and go to get answers. The twosome bust heads together but are in for a shocking revelation that doesn’t send em home happy, but does conclude the story.

The Conclusion

On paper, a crossover between Batman and Elmer Fudd, especially one with a physical confrontation, doesn’t seem to make much sense. Yet here we are in 2017 getting one of the weirder crossovers that magically…works.

Highly recommended, and as a bonus there’s a back-up story that features Batman in the Looney Tunes verse and plays like the classic exchange between Bugs/Daffy/Elmer.