![](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEhXU7trQvqLG8DMSh5kmdcpgq7s6N8Bo0FHb6a33inO0FMZmcJrxjVDqSpGsekSuVVi8cm0Idp6lFjLb0ouCqMGkrEZqwR0EEQAYvemA-AvQS_nJUtz0YHymRwUolCqRYJwfy1FBK4ZzkCbYah4cOeMNEhL1NPbUoWeYImZVYxMgWTsqbSBw-pEidSzrQ\/w520-h640\/rance%20shark%20summit.JPG\" "\\"rance")
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Golden Age crossovers were a pretty rare thing, other than in places like All-Star Comics<\/i> where that was the whole idea, but one place you occasionally encounter them is in the kind of adventure strips that filled out the bulk of anthology comics before the super-heroes really got into full market domination mode, and especially<\/i> if the same person was working on both characters and wanted to have them meet up and say what a good series of adventures each other was having. <\/p>\n
The weird thing about this<\/i> meetup is that Rance Keane, a Quality character and star of the strip, is meeting Shark Egan, a Dell character whose own adventures had been cancelled more than a year earlier, in Popular Comics<\/i> 053! The characters are roughly equivalent – Shark is a sea dog-style adventurer while Rance is a cowboy who transitioned into the same – but this dockside mutual admiration moment is very unlikely!<\/p>\n
If I were to advance a theory it would be to speculate that Rance Keane scribe William A Smith might have had a hand in Shark Egan too – some of the earlier strips in Popular<\/i> look a bit like his work – and decided to reappropriate his creations once they were defunct at Dell. We will never know what his plans were though, as both Shark and Rance made but one more appearance in Feature <\/i>046 before setting off for parts unknown.<\/p>\n