[Meeting…] Access

After the special item where we review the characters from the first season of Getting to Know... and after a few months of vacation, it's time to get back to action with the second season of this section.

Recent superhero movies have begun to show the general public basic things for the comic book reader, such as that Batman and Spider-man do not belong to the same universe, or that there are "repeated or too similar" characters between one company and another.

The Greatest Battle Ever Told Needs a Referee

In terms of Marvel and DC comics rivalry, superhero comics are what Star Wars and Star Trek to science fiction. Both have famous characters and tremendously popular stories and a huge legion of fans who would argue absurdly about fictional and hypothetical situations for hours. After all, it is very tempting to start a conversation with: Do you think Hulk can beat Superman? And see how the defenders of both characters present their theories.

Obviously both Marvel and DC are aware of these facts, which is why in the mid-90s they decided to make a crossover where the characters of both companies fought for the survival of their universe, was born DC Versus Marvel (either Marvel Versus DC).

The idea was simple but required a bit of history to give it a minimum of coherence. The first thing was to clarify that in this crossover the characters from both companies lived in totally different universes (unlike what happened in some previous comics where they shared the same universe) and the second was that there was a character called Access with the ability to go from one universe to another.

Total and unlimited access

Thus, Access was the only being capable of voluntarily traveling between the Marvel and DC universes, an ability that became very necessary in the limited series that followed the crossover. Marvel VS DC, where this character had to keep both universes completely separate to avoid possible fusions between them, a situation that occurred at the end of said crossover after the fight between Batman and Captain America.

And precisely, these fusions ended up becoming one of Acceso's abilities, which discovered that it was capable of mixing characters from both universes voluntarily if the situation required it, thus avoiding greater evils. Which is tremendously paradoxical if we take into account that its job is to keep both universes completely separate.

These abilities were not exploited in Marvel Vs. DC because the important thing was the fights between the superheroes of both houses and seeing which universe prevailed, but they did have much more importance in the limited series Full Access and Unlimited Access that appeared later, where Access was the core of the story.

In those limited series the writers managed to provoke some pretty strange situations, which included dead characters or strange (or old) versions of them. So we would see Hal Jordan again (who had recently died) as Green Lantern fighting against a tremendously brutal and brainless Hulk that reminded us of the most classic version of the character, moving away from the current one of those years, which was intelligent in its Hulk state.

Things got even worse when the idea of ​​mixing characters “at will” was introduced, giving us some quite pitiful ones and others tremendously interesting (at least in design) like Thor-El, who turns out to be the mix between classic Thor and the “electric” Superman of the 90s.

Due to these details, we could say that Access was always in the shadow of the other characters even in its own collections, however its existence was necessary to see how Marvel and DC shook hands at a time in which neither of the two companies was going through its best economic moment (which surely led to the creation of this crossover of universes).

Conclusion and Recommendations

Acceso is an interesting character despite not being too charismatic, his abilities and his story are linked to one of the wet dreams that superhero comics geeks have had for decades and that cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately, the fact that this character belongs to Marvel and DC at the same time, leaves him in a very uncomfortable situation to star in comics again, because if both companies do not agree, he will never appear again, which seems to be his sad fate, since after these crossovers he has been used rarely.

If someone wants to read stories with this character, they are lucky, because there is little material about him and it is not too extensive, so I am putting the most important things in chronological order:

DC Vs Marvel/ Marvel Vs DC (1996) 4-issue limited series

Dr Strangefate (1996) single issue

Total Access / All Access (1997) 4-issue limited series

Unlimited Access/Unlimited Access (1998) limited series of 4 issues.