That aspect of the story got us to thinking: What are some of our favorite mash-ups? The fights or team-ups so obvious that we thought they'd never get around to it, or so preposterous that we never even considered them before they made it to the printed page? Below we've got a list of ten of our favorites...what are yours?

To be clear--intra-company crossovers are verboten here, so you won't see "Superman and Batman" or "Hulk vs. Thing" on the list. There are hundreds of those and while the best of them may be great fodder for another list, this one occurred to us mostly as an outcropping of the "X vs. Y" formula that yielded movies like Alien Vs. Predator. It's arguably a silly distinction, since Avengers vs. X-Men is unto itself an intra-company crossover...but it's our silly distinction and we're sticking to it. We also have steered away from the massive "event" stories and are sticking with stories that were either one-shots, movies or one-off stories, as opposed to something like JLA/Avengers or even DC Vs. Marvel.

Alien vs. Predator What began as a Dark Horse Comics story eventually evolved into a comics franchise so potent that it was adapted into not one but two feature films.

Fans of the movies were caught totally off-guard, and fans of the comics were shocked to hear that the first film was finally a reality after years of bugging the rights-holders that it had the potential to be brilliant...and while neither of the films exactly stood up as masterpieces of cinema, they were entertaining and arguably better than the then-current installments of either individual series. The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones

This one was so obvious, in terms not only of being two of Hanna-Barbera's most evergreen properties at the time but also in terms of the pair being essentially the same premise, just set in different times, that it's almost surprising it took them years to do it, and that it came as a standalone movie as opposed to just being an episode of The Jetsons. That said, as a kid I found it endlessly entertaining, and it's a dead heat between this and the Superfriends as the first time that I ever considered the idea that my favorite characters might inhabit the same universe. Even now, after having seen Star Wars a hundred times and read more American superhero comics than I can count, that realization can sometimes throw me for a loop; when it turned out that Tambi and Kasey from Strangers in Paradise were actually characters in Echo, I got so giddy that I probably still owe Terry Moore a beer all this time after. Archie Meets the Punisher

Every so often, Archie finds himself meeting up with some really strange folks (most recently, KISS), but there's nothing quite like seeing The Punisher in Riverdale to give you pause. At the time, The Punisher was so wildly and ridiculously popular that he would appear in Marvel comics for a panel or two, just to say he was there, in hopes of boosting sales. He set the standard for the kind of silly and gratuitous guest appearances that Deadpool would pick up on in later years. It was a strange and terrible era, and believe me when I tell you--back in my Wizard magazine days, I was once assigned to read EVERY APPEARANCE THE CHARACTER HAD EVER MADE in order to create a statistically-accurate "rap sheet" for a wanted poster they were tipping in with one of the magazines.