Deathmate

Deathmate is a six-part comic book crossover series between Valiant Comics and Image Comics published in 1993–94. The series is remembered for its negative impact on comic book retailers and the industry as a whole due to its late, over-ordered but poorly-selling books.

Comics historian Jason Sacks described it as the first major comic universe crossover since the Marvel Comics / DC Comics crossover The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans was published in 1982.

The plot revolved around a chance interdimensional meeting of two characters, Solar from Valiant and Void from Image's WildC.A.T.s. The two became lovers, but their joining would mean the destruction of both the Image Universe and Valiant Universe.

The project was the result of a series of conversations Image Comics co-founder Jim Lee and then Valiant Comics publisher Steve Massarsky and Vice President of Marketing Jon Hartz had in 1992 over the possibility of a crossover. In late 1992, Lee, Image Comics co-founder Rob Liefeld, Massarsky, and Hartz met in Kansas City and agreed that each company would create two issues of the crossover, and jointly provide personnel to create the two book-end issues, Deathmate Prologue and Deathmate Epilogue. In a retrospective interview on the rise and fall of Valiant, former editor-in-chief Bob Layton claimed he was not consulted on the project. "Deathmate was thrust upon us because (Steve) Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover," Layton said.

The four main issues were designated by color rather than issue numbers (namely Yellow, Blue, Black, and Red), so they could be read in any order to accommodate any publishing delays. Created at the peak of the comic book speculator boom, the project was heavily promoted and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but was beset with production delays on the Image Comics side. To ensure the prologue shipped on time, Layton said he had to fly to Los Angeles and literally sit on Liefeld's doorstep until Liefeld finished his penciled art for the Deathmate Prologue. Layton inked the artwork himself in an Anaheim hotel room. The Yellow and Blue issues, produced by Valiant, shipped on time in July and early August respectively. Black, produced by Lee's studio, was solicited for late summer but didn't ship until October. Red, produced by Liefeld's studio, shipped in December, four months late, and after Deathmate Epilogue.

Only half of the six Image partners chose to participate. Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Todd McFarlane were not involved, although McFarlane's character Al Simmons makes a brief appearance in Deathmate Red.

In a world that had been long since become a terrible place, Solar reluctantly granted the wish of his lifelong companion, Gayle Nordheim to dissipate the lifegiving energy that had kept her alive and young for so long. So unable to contain his grief over her death, Solar was literally split in two. The remaining Solar vanished into a life of seclusion while the new persona went off to find other planes of reality to explore.

There, in a dimension between what is real and unreal, he encountered a creature of incredible power, a woman from a distant universe, Void. The two fell in love, a love that wound end all time literally. Upon consummating, their combined energies fused, unwarping the fabric of time, spiraling backwards and eating away at their distinct timelines. In an instant, things were not as they should be: heroes fought alongside those who had been their enemies in a different world; great men who would bring justice to the world died horrible, untimely deaths. Only men with the gift of foresight, Geoff McHenry and Prophet, knew that all was not as it should be. Where they had seen a future so clearly before, there was now nothing.