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I had the first two Elseworlds and they both blew my mind at the time. "Gotham By Gaslight" was 1880s Batman going after a Jack The Ripper style murderer, and worked well as a mystery and as a period piece. "Batman: Holy Terror" was Batman as a rebel against a Protestant/Puritan theocracy that was kidnapping, brainwashing and killing superhumans. I still don't know if the name of the Green Man Project in Holy Terror was a deliberate fakeout or not. I assumed it would be either Green Lantern or Martian Manhunter, but what I got left me pretty surprised. (The symbolism was a little over-the-top, though.) There was another Batman Elseworlds where instead of seeing a bat that inspires him, he sees the spaceship Abin Sur was flying. In that reality, the spaceship crashes on the East Coast instead of in the Southwest. So when the ring scans for people with exceptional willpower nearby, it finds Bruce Wayne and Abin Sur gives him the ring. It's a great setup but wasn't a very good story, and it really fell apart when Sinestro became the Joker for some reason. One of my favorite Elseworlds was a John Byrne one where a Kryptonian from the El family (but not Kal-El) is the lone survivor of Krypton's explosion. He lands in North America just before the Revolution, takes over the world and only lets it advance to about the late-19th/early 20th century level. His reasoning is that advanced science is partly what killed Krypton in the end, so he doesn't want that happening again. His mostly-human nephew Kal rebels against this and things get interesting. The ending seems kind of rushed and sudden in retrospect but it was an unexpected turn, which I always enjoy.
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Sep 1, 2013 14:11
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eliotlucas posted:I was replaying Batman: Arkham City the other night and it got me thinking. Has there ever been an Elseworlds story where Batman takes up Ra's al Ghul on his offer to become his successor? Sort of: In a John Byrne Superman/Batman Elseworlds series called "Generations" they show Bruce become the new Ras for a while. He directs the group's criminal activity for decades, in a way that slowly phases it out in favor of legit businesses that make money by helping people. Then he hands the job off to his grandson so he can go be Batman again. (Which he can do because of the Lazarus Pit).
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Sep 5, 2013 00:21
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Mind Loving Owl posted:Has anyone read those Stan Lee writing the DC universe books? I'm reading the Superman one at the moment, and there's some good ideas it's obvious Stan Lee hasn't updated his writing style in fifty years. I remember really liking Stan Lee's take on Wonder Woman. A South American woman who was part Native American as a pro-woman super hero? I'm surprised DC didn't try to run with that, it's a hugely untapped market. EDIT: Mind Loving Owl posted:Anyone got any anti-recs? Elseworlds to avoid? There was a Batman one that had Bruce Wayne as an amateur Egyptologist. He became Batman because of a mysterious Egyptian artifact with a bat-like symbol on it. Apparently his parents were killed for it and he finally decided to try and unravel the mystery (20 years later) by going to Egypt and trying to find the secret room hidden under the Sphinx. There's a lot of "ancient aliens" insinuations but no real resolution. picosecond fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 14:01
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Quote != edit
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Sep 5, 2013 14:06
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Did the Batman/Judge Dredd crossovers count as Elseworlds or were they part of main DC continuity?
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Sep 7, 2013 06:18
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This thread made me dig out "Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe." The art isn't great but it's mean-spirited fun and has three great moments. The first is where Punisher sets up a trap for Spider-Man & Venom while they're fighting in the sewers & kills them both. The second is when he fights Doom, pulls out a last-second win and decides to get Doom out of his armor by hitting it repeatedly with a hammer and chisel. The third is where he takes out almost the entire X-Men cast (heroes and villains) in one shot, with a nuclear bomb. This was written by Garth Ennis, which is not surprising -- but I'm pretty sure it was written before his acclaimed run as the Punisher's writer. The superheroes are kinda dumb assholes, but that's typical for Ennis and also it kinda makes sense in the story's context. To a guy like Frank Castle, how else would superheroes look, ya know?
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Sep 8, 2013 00:03
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I freakin' love this thread, cuz it's inspiring me to dig out a bunch of great comics that I'd forgotten about. Right now I'm re-reading "The Golden Age" by James Robinson. It basically covers what happened to the first wave of superheroes, from the end of WWII to the mid-1950s. I should read this and "DC: The New Frontier" by Darwyn Cooke at the same time. Then I'd have a great in-my-head continuity of post-Golden/pre-Silver Age DC that would be way better than whatever New 52 has in store.
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Sep 13, 2013 21:40
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Heroes Reborn and Marvel's MC2 line (Spider-Girl's universe) would also count.
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Sep 16, 2013 20:34
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Does anyone remember an Elseworlds where a mentally slow kid who loves Batman dresses up as him to fight his sister's drug dealer boyfriend? It might've been part of that Realworlds thing.
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Sep 20, 2013 18:53
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Hollis posted:I kind of liked hook hand Aquaman, are there even any Elseworld Aquaman titles? Elseworlds were generally reserved for the most popular characters and titles, which is why Batman and Superman have like 30 of them while everyone else has like 2 or 3. I have vague memories of an Aquaman Elseworlds. In the book, he's old and the oceans are drying up, so he leads an army to land to find a new spot for Atlantis and things get all Mad Max.
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Sep 22, 2013 22:26
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Hollis posted:That sounds loving awesome. I'm assuming it wasn't very good? I liked it when it came out, it had a Conan/Road Warrior vibe -- but that was maybe 15 years ago, so I can't remember it too well anymore. I think it was written by Peter David, who's rarely bad, so draw your own conclusion. It was called was something like "The Dying Earth" if you want to hunt through the back issue bins to find it.
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Sep 24, 2013 20:48
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Mind Loving Owl posted:Also here's a game, think up elseworld scenarios for heroes who rarely get them! I would've liked to see an Elseworlds where Dick Grayson doesn't get adopted by Bruce Wayne and goes bad. Here's my pitch: Dick becomes an orphan raised by the circus, generally friendly and nice but with an intense anger growing in him. He learns the scams of the carnies, picks up some stage magic, improves his acrobatics skills, maybe learns some acting, stuntwork & escapology, too. When he's 16, he travels back to Gotham and uses those skills to track down and kill the mob boss that ordered his parents deaths. From there he becomes a killer for hire. The skills Richie Grayson developed in the circus (yes, Richie, don't you dare call him Dick) make him so good that he becomes a sort of underworld legend. He returns to Gotham years later and finds that his presence attracted the attention of a shadowy new figure called The Batman... who happens to have quite a price on his head. So while the Batman's after him, he's going after the Batman too. What do you guys think? Should I pitch it to DC?
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Oct 4, 2013 03:48
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CzarChasm posted:There have been quite a few Elseworlds stories where Superman flies off the handle and does his Evil God King shtick, was there ever one where Batman gets to create his crime free utopia? There's one where a nuclear war happens and Gotham is one of the last places to have civilization, because Bruce Wayne becomes a dictator. Anarky is one of the few people who's questioning Bruce's reign and starts looking into some unanswered questions about it. He learns that Bruce had filled the water supply with drugs to curb people's free will, since free will leads to criminal urges. He hijacks a TV broadcast to show Gotham City what Batman did, which leads to them marching on Wayne Manor with torches. Bruce does his own TV broadcast where he admits what he did and says he'll accept their judgment of him. The Gothamites set fire to Wayne Manor and it ends with Bruce deciding to stay in his home, as it burns down around him.
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Oct 12, 2013 22:51
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That reminds me of an Elseworlds I liked as a kid. It was set in a future where Ras Al Ghul beat Batman. He puts out some plague that kills like 90% of the human race, then he dressed up his best killers from the League Of Assassins in Batman costumes, to kill surviving leaders and take over the planet. Bruce and Talia's son studies Batman's tactics and goes after them in his own Batman costume. I don't remember what it was called but I really dug it at the time.
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Nov 14, 2013 00:13
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Lurdiak posted:That's part of how elseworlds tend to put the main universe on a pedestal. Any deviation from Superman and Batman's traditional roles usually end disastrously and either something resembling the status quo is restored at the end, setting things right, or someone looks into the distance and is like "man, we sure should have formed the Justice League instead". I can think of a few Elseworlds that bucked that trend, though. I've mentioned them all in this thread before, since they tend to be my favorite ones. Two that I haven't mentioned were a Batman one set in Renaissance Italy, where the Bruce Wayne stand-in hangs up his Batman costume after a few months and a Robin set in 18th-century Japan that ends with the Robin stand-in failing at his mission and committing seppuku.
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Nov 15, 2013 17:02
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Random Stranger posted:IIRC that was firm continuity from about the 70's to the 2000's. HG Wells's martians invade and kill all the heroes. Eventually Killraven defeats them and the earth recovers. That timeline was also the setting for the '90s Guardians Of The Galaxy run, which I really loved.
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Nov 16, 2013 20:06
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Nevvy Z posted:It wasn't really a comic book but a webcomic, I think SMBC, did a thing about Superman eventually just generating infinite electricity and we can raise the quality of life everywhere on Earth to such a level that crime doesn't exist and everyone is basically happy. It was pretty neat. I remember a similar story with Superman. Pa Kent dies of a heart attack, Clark Kent goes to medical school and uses his powers to become this one-man international EMT unit.
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Nov 19, 2013 16:20
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