JLA/Avengers: the Justice League vs. the Avengers, the 2003 crossover
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Everything you need to know about JLA/Avengers, the miniseries in which the Justice League of America, with Superman in its ranks, meets Marvel's Avengers. Kurt Busiek writes it, George Pérez draws it, and DC and Marvel take turns publishing it from September 2003 to March 2004. The two teams face off on behalf of Krona and the Grandmaster, then join forces. You'll discover the project abandoned in 1983, the two rounds between Superman and Thor, and the hammer that Clark only borrows.
📋 Contents
- JLA/Avengers at a glance: four issues, two publishers, from 2003 to 2004
- Twenty years of waiting: the crossover abandoned in 1983
- Krona and the Grandmaster: a cosmic wager on two teams
- Superman on the Marvel Earth, Captain America in Metropolis
- The hunt for the artifacts: from the Orb of Ra to the Cosmic Cube
- Superman vs. Thor: a magic hammer, then a KO
- When the two universes merge: Superman against Captain America
- The shield and the hammer: Superman in the assault on Krona
- Before JLA/Avengers: the DC/Marvel meetings of 1976 and 1996
- Sales and reprints: reading JLA/Avengers today
- FAQ — Frequently asked questions
- Conclusion
JLA/Avengers at a glance: four issues, two publishers, from 2003 to 2004
JLA/Avengers is a four-issue miniseries that DC Comics and Marvel Comics publish together. Kurt Busiek writes the script, George Pérez handles the pencils and the inks, Tom Smith the colors and the Comicraft studio the lettering. Each issue comes out in prestige format, 48 pages sold for $5.95. On one side stands the Justice League of America, where Superman rubs shoulders with Batman, the Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and the Flash Wally West. Facing them, the Avengers field the likes of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man.
The two publishers also split the issues between them. Marvel publishes #1 and #3 under the title JLA/Avengers, DC publishes #2 and #4 under the reversed title Avengers/JLA. In the United States, the first three go on sale between September and November 2003; the last one keeps readers waiting four months and doesn't arrive until March 31, 2004. So the series starts in 2003, but it ends the following year. The dates printed on the covers, for their part, vary from one database to another. Even the chapter titles play along with the split: the first two refer to Marvel titles, the last two to DC titles.
| Issue | Cover title | Publisher | Chapter | US on-sale date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | JLA/Avengers | Marvel | “A Journey into Mystery” | September 4, 2003 |
| 2 | Avengers/JLA | DC | “A Contest of Champions” | October 22, 2003 |
| 3 | JLA/Avengers | Marvel | “Strange Adventures” | November 26, 2003 |
| 4 | Avengers/JLA | DC | “The Brave and the Bold” | March 31, 2004 |
Twenty years of waiting: the crossover abandoned in 1983
The meeting between the two teams could have come out twenty years earlier. DC and Marvel agree in principle as early as 1979. Gerry Conway writes the story, Roy Thomas handles the script, and the plot hinges on time travel involving Kang and Epoch, the Lord of Time. By mid-1983, Pérez has already penciled 21 pages, for a release planned for May 1983. Then editorial disagreements get the whole thing canceled. Several sources attribute them to Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief at the time, but his role has been reported rather than established.
A new agreement between the two publishers revives the project in 2002. Kurt Busiek becomes its sole writer, because Mark Waid is under an exclusive contract with CrossGen at the time. Pérez is working for CrossGen too, but a clause in his contract allows him to draw this crossover if it gets approved. So he comes back to the project twenty years later, with a completely different story: Krona and the Grandmaster replace Kang and Epoch. All that remains from the 1980s are his 21 pages, published for the first time in 2004 in a DC slipcased set.
Krona and the Grandmaster: a cosmic wager on two teams
The big villain of the series doesn't come from Superman's universe. Krona is an exiled Oan, an adversary taken from the adventures of Green Lantern. He destroys universes to uncover the secret of creation. The Grandmaster, a cosmic power from Marvel, then offers him a game. The League competes for the Grandmaster, the Avengers for Krona, without a single hero knowing whose side they are playing on. The sides are crossed: the DC team plays for a Marvel figure, the Marvel team for an enemy who comes from DC.
The rules come down to a few numbers: twelve artifacts to gather, six in each universe. Metron, a DC god, pushes the Avengers to join the game. So the heroes race from one Earth to the other to collect these objects, which quickly brings them face to face. Superman joins in as a mere member of the League, knowing nothing of the wager being played out above his head. Once the game is over, though, it's against Krona that the two teams will end up fighting, together this time.
Superman on the Marvel Earth, Captain America in Metropolis
In the first issue, “A Journey into Mystery,” each team discovers the other's world, and the meeting starts off with unease. On the Marvel Earth, Superman finds mutants being hunted down and unloved superheroes, and he is shocked by it. In his eyes, the heroes of this Earth have left their world to fend for itself. The story doesn't turn him into a villain: it shows him judging a world by the standards of his own.
Mirroring this, Captain America discovers Metropolis. There he sees heroes who rule like “gods,” and he finds this world almost fascist. The two men are looking at the same thing, supermen in the midst of ordinary people, and they draw opposite conclusions: for one, Marvel's heroes don't do enough; for the other, DC's take up too much room. This disagreement weighs on the first contact, which quickly turns into a fight, and it resurfaces in the third issue.
The hunt for the artifacts: from the Orb of Ra to the Cosmic Cube
The second issue, “A Contest of Champions,” published by DC, truly kicks off the race for the objects. Superman teams up with Green Lantern, in this case Kyle Rayner and not Hal Jordan. In Santo Rico, the two heroes defeat Wonder Man and Warbird, the name Carol Danvers goes by at the time, and bring back the Orb of Ra. Meanwhile, Hawkeye and Iron Man find a Marvel artifact, the Casket of Ancient Winters, hidden in Smallville, the town where Clark grew up.
The game ends in the Savage Land, on the Marvel side, around the Cosmic Cube. Captain America throws his shield and knocks the Cube out of Quicksilver's hands; Batman grabs it right away. The JLA thus wins the game, seven artifacts to five. So the decisive point doesn't go to Superman, but to an Avenger's move and Batman's reflexes. It's in this same battle that Superman and Thor meet again for their second round. Yet winning the game settles nothing: in the next issue, the two universes start to blur into each other.
Superman vs. Thor: a magic hammer, then a KO
The duel between Superman and Thor plays out in two stages. The first issue ends with Thor hurling Mjolnir at Superman. The hammer is magic, and magic is one of the known flaws in Superman's invulnerability: the blow wounds him. The second round takes place in Avengers/JLA #2, during the battle in the Savage Land. This time, Superman stops Mjolnir in mid-swing, then knocks Thor out. Each of them has scored a point, and the series doesn't declare any winner beyond these two scenes.
This second round left its mark. Tom Brevoort, the Marvel editor on the series, has described it as his “greatest crime” in comics, at least in the eyes of some readers: according to him, Thor fans protested. He told the story on the Word Balloon podcast, and Popverse reported his comments in April 2026. Outside this series, the question of who would win is still up for debate, for the Superman vs Thor and Superman vs Hulk matchups.
When the two universes merge: Superman against Captain America
The third issue, “Strange Adventures,” published by Marvel, sends the story in a new direction. The realities start to mix. Superman and Captain America sense that something is off, accuse each other of warping the world and come to blows. Further on, Superman and Iron Man fly up into space and see two giant hands forcing the two Earths together. In a snow-covered Metropolis, Aquaman comes across a Daily Planet where Clark Kent is interviewing Spider-Man.
Before he dies, the Grandmaster gives the heroes back the memory of their true history, tragedies included. For Superman, that means remembering his death at the hands of Doomsday, at the heart of The Death of Superman. Doomsday, Cyborg Superman and the Eradicator are in fact on the issue's list of characters. The distortions also bring back heroes who were absent from the 2003 League: Hal Jordan, who had become the Spectre by then, turns back into Green Lantern, and Barry Allen takes up the role of the Flash again, for the duration of #3 and #4. If you run into them in these pages, it's an effect of the merging, not the League of that era.
The shield and the hammer: Superman in the assault on Krona
In Avengers/JLA #4, “The Brave and the Bold,” the two teams are no longer playing against each other. Superman and Batman hand command over to Captain America, who lends his shield to Superman for the assault on Krona's citadel. The Man of Steel comes close to defeat there: Radioactive Man attacks him with kryptonite radiation, Solarr with red sun energy. The Vision, badly damaged, transfers to him the solar energy he has left. This time, the hero who judged the Avengers owes his rescue to one of them.
Then comes the hammer scene. Pinned down by androids, Thor throws Mjolnir to Superman so that he can bring down Krona's last defense, and Clark fights with both the shield and the hammer. After the battle, he can no longer lift it. The explanation offered is that Odin lifted the enchantment for a time, and the Marvel Database lists Superman among the wielders “with Odin's permission”: he got a loan, not a verdict of worthiness. To wrap things up, the Flash distracts Krona, Hawkeye fires an explosive arrow into the machine that keeps the universes merged, and Krona becomes a cosmic egg, stored in the JLA Watchtower.
Before JLA/Avengers: the DC/Marvel meetings of 1976 and 1996
JLA/Avengers doesn't kick off the history of crossovers between DC and Marvel. The first superhero crossover between the two publishers comes out in 1976: it's the one-shot Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man. Nor is 2003 the first time the League and the Avengers meet. Their members had already clashed in 1996, in DC versus Marvel, remembered for its reader votes, and that same year, the Amalgam line merged heroes from both publishers. The series by Busiek and Pérez comes after them, with a different agenda: four issues in which the two teams fight each other, then join forces.
The crossover leaves its mark on both universes. On the DC side, Krona's cosmic egg turns up again later in the series Trinity. On the Marvel side, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe describes the adventure: so the series is part of both publishers' continuity. On screen, however, there is nothing, neither an animated film nor a live-action movie.
Sales and reprints: reading JLA/Avengers today
When it comes out, the first issue finds its audience. Comichron estimates it at about 191,014 copies, the second-best seller of September 2003 behind Batman #619. CBR relays an announcement from Marvel: more than 200,000 copies of #1 produced for comic book specialty stores. The first figure remains an estimate, the second a publisher's announcement. In France, Semic publishes the series in 2004, in four issues of a magazine of the same name, and no French reprint has been recorded since.
In English, the story has had several lives. In 2004, DC releases a slipcased set of two hardcover volumes in the “Absolute” format, priced at $75, with the 21 pages from 1983. A trade paperback collection follows in November 2008. In 2022, a 288-page reprint, priced at $29.99 and limited to a print run of 7,000 copies, pays tribute to Pérez, who was ill at the time, with the proceeds going to the Hero Initiative. In 2026, facsimile editions bring back the original issues and their Pérez covers, plus connecting variant covers by Alex Ross on #3 and #4.
FAQ — Frequently asked questions
When did JLA/Avengers come out?
The first of the four issues arrives in the United States on September 4, 2003, the last on March 31, 2004. Marvel and DC take turns publishing them: the series starts in 2003 and ends the following year.
Is Superman worthy of lifting Mjolnir?
Not in this story. Thor throws him his hammer during the final assault, then Superman can no longer lift it. The accepted explanation is temporary permission from Odin.
Who wins between Superman and Thor in JLA/Avengers?
Each of them scores a point. Mjolnir wounds Superman at the end of the first issue, then Superman knocks Thor out in Avengers/JLA #2. The story doesn't name any overall winner.
Who wins the game between the League and the Avengers?
The JLA, seven artifacts to five. Batman grabs the Cosmic Cube that Captain America knocked out of Quicksilver's hands. The two teams then end up on the same side against Krona.
Is JLA/Avengers the first crossover between DC and Marvel?
No. Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man brings the two publishers together as early as 1976, and DC versus Marvel pits members of the League and the Avengers against each other in 1996. JLA/Avengers comes after them.
Is there a JLA/Avengers movie?
No. Neither an animated film nor a live-action movie has adapted the series. The story exists only in comic book form.
Can you read JLA/Avengers in French?
Yes, in the Semic edition released in 2004, in four issues of a magazine with the same title. No French reprint has been recorded since.
Conclusion
JLA/Avengers reads in four stages: unease between two worlds, a hunt for artifacts, a reality that goes haywire, then an alliance against Krona. Superman gets wounded by Thor, beats him in the second round, clashes with Captain America, then fights under his command.
To go back to where it all began, start with the 1976 crossover, then move on to DC versus Marvel. And to place this adventure among Clark's teams, follow his alliances in the DC Universe.