As everyone knows, of course, Spawn and Batman appeared together in Frank Miller’s one-shot 1994 crossover story, which was jointly published by DC and Image. Although that story is not considered to be part of the canonical continuity of either character, it’s not really stretching to say that Spawn has been coexistent with the “DC Universe” on at least one occasion, under circumstances that were not created either as a side-effect of the operation of The Flash’s “Cosmic Treadmill” or as a consequence of interdimensional meddling by DC’s reality-bending Anti-Monitor character.
It’s also possible that this image represents some “elastic” variant of the Amalgam Universe, which was created by The Spectre and The Living Tribunal in order to resolve the space-time paradox implicit in the 1996 Marvel vs. DC Comics series that pitted marquee characters from each publishing house against one another. Naturally, such a construct was inherently unstable, and could only be sustained temporarily, although certainly long enough for the Photoshop scene above to have occurred and been recorded.
As a courtesy, I’ll belay any speculation involving the Cosmic Cube, Reed Richard’s Negative Zone or a prankish intervention by the Bahdnisian Thunderbolt, since that sort of thinking is lazier than a Red Kryptonite plotline.
Why are you all looking at me like that?
