Back in August we were pleased to announce that Marvel Studios, and by association Disney, had reacquired the rights to Daredevil. That means that Matt Murdoch can finally make his way into the expanded film universe that The Avengers have proven so wonderfully adept in, and maybe we'll all get a chance to have the unwatchable mismatch that we were treated to in 2003.
Still, something was tickling our minds back when the announcement was made. Something like a prophecy fulfilled. And since the world of pop culture is more or less exactly like that of religion, or even better, all it required for someone to consume some alcohol and track the threads of Daredevil through the threads of geekdom until everything made some kind of sense. Easy? No. Possible? Hell yeah!
First thing's first... did you know that Daredevil and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles take place in the same universe? It's true. In Daredevil #1 a young Matt Murdoch is hit with a can of radioactive ooze that falls off a truck because in the Marvel universe the stuff of lawsuits and Lifetime movies is also the stuff of legends.
20 years later Kevin Eastman drew a picture of a turtle with nunchucks that busted his friend Peter Laird up laughing, and the two began writing a comic. Since they were both big Daredevil fans they decided to just steal the scene right out from the Daredevil comic, but follow the ooze canister after it fell into the sewers and created the four heroes we remember so well. This was never official, you understand, but you can tell from the art above that it was also completely true.
Now, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was Mirage comics, but it also branched into the world of Image comics when the turtles teamed up on several occasions with the Savage Dragon. Image comics also boasts Todd Macfarlane's Spawn, another one of the Dragon's occasional allies. Here's where we make a jump.
Despite Spawn's popularity over the years he hasn't exactly made his mark on the world of video games. In fact, only one can truly be said to be any good at all, and that is his spot as a guest character in Soul Calibur II. The idea of the game was that each platform would receive a special character. The Xbox got Spawn, The Playstion got Heihachi Mishima, and the Gamecube got Link from the Legend of Zelda in one of his few non-Nintendo titles since the disaster that was licensing the character to the Philips CD-i.
Judging by what I just said, you'd think that the three games are actually three separate parallel universes, but that doesn't take into account the character of Necrid that appeals in all three. Designed by Macfarlane, the character draws heavily on hellspawn attributes he wove into Spawn's design.
