8 Mind-Blowing Ways Your Favourite Pop Culture Universes Are Connected

In the real world, if you want to live a long life, you need to exercise and eat right, but if you’re a comic book character, you can just go hang around a meteorite and chances are you’ll come out of it immortal. That’s what happened to the Marvel hero Ulysses Bloodstone (what, was the name Cool-guy Knifepunch already taken?) who gained eternal life from a piece of meteorite embedded in his chest.

Now, in the comics, this all happened tens of thousands of years ago. Specifically, during the Hyborian Age, the very same time period created by Robert E. Howard for his Conan the Barbarian stories. That’s right: Ulysses and Conan all hail from the same legendary “vanished age” of swords and sorcery (and aliens, seeing as Ulysses’ meteorite turned out to be controlled by an evil spaceman because of course it did.) And you know what they say: when there’s Conan, there’s Cthulhu.

OK, fine, they don’t actually say so, but they should because in one of the first Conan stories, “The Tower of the Elephant,” Howard straight-up namedropped Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, and Yog-Sothoth. We can now go from Cthulhu to Conan, Marvel, and all the previously mentioned franchises, making Ninja Turtles vs. Cthulhu not only a great idea, but also a canonically-consistent one.