What IF....

[ddm92392]

what if the voters voted to keep Jason Todd alive

 

[Spike_x1]

O really...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman

An epic rebuttal if I've ever seen one.

 

[Varient]

Come on, guys! They would make sweet Elseworlds stories.

With Respect:

Elseworlds IS DC's "What If" Series.

My Fav of course was the one where Lois Dies and Superman Gets with Maxima,....


My DC What if's go more along the lines of:

What if the JSA had not disbanded?

What if Earth Angel / Linda Danvers had not dropped off the DC radar shortly before the Current Super Girl Showed up.
(A lot of crap that could have been resolved by her added power wouldn't have happened.)

What if The Guardians Decided to accept the Magic Component of their power and Started a Magic Corp to run alongside the science? where you had one of each for each sector?


What If Doralla Kon came back to Earth after the death of Bart Allen?



What if There were more than three Deathstrokes?


Meh,... Now I'm getting stupid.

 

[Artistsean]

What if Green Arrow shaved his beard and/or mustache?

What if Commissioner Gordon shaved off his mustache?

What if he also colored his hair?
and What if he also used contacts or got Laser Eye Surgery?

 

[Andy C.]

What if DC had stayed with the 80's Man of Steel origin for Supes instead of ramping up his powers and taking him back to his pre-crisis roots?

Then we'd still have a watered-down Superman who feels like a D-list Marvel character and isn't any fun to read.

 

[Tropico]

As someone who started reading the Pre-Crisis version and then the Post-crisis version I disagree with you. I found the stories way more interesting and more accessible. But, I know that's a matter of opinion.

What if JLA Detroit had been the founding Leaguers.

 

[Harlekin]

That would've been glorious.

 

[Andy C.]

As someone who started reading the Pre-Crisis version and then the Post-crisis version I disagree with you. I found the stories way more interesting and more accessible. But, I know that's a matter of opinion.

I could just never get into MoS-era Superman; to be fair, though, I didn't start reading Superman regularly till after I read Birthright, so I suppose I'm more inclined to wanting the more Silver-Agey elements of the mythos.

Anyway, back on topic:

What if Barry Allen survived Crisis on Infinite Earths?

 

[Fledermaus]

Anyway, back on topic:

What if Barry Allen survived Crisis on Infinite Earths?

He would have died in Infinite Crisis.

 

[Varient]

What If,............................:

t:

 

[ddm92392]

Disney world would be alot darker and cooler

 

[Fledermaus]

Just like EuroDisney!!!

 

[project13]

Here are some new what ifs:

What if baby Lar Gand (not Kal-El) was raised by the Kents? (In this world, baby Kal-El died when Krypton exploded, Lar Gand however was saved from Daxam's destruction.)

What if Terra never betrayed the Teen Titans (in the first place)?

What if Barbara Gordon was never shot/paralyzed by the Joker?

What if Jason Todd is really Hush?

What if the first Robin was a teenage Bruce Wayne?

What if Alan Scott became Parallax and was replaced by Hal Jordan? (It would be an alternate "Emerald Twlight/New Dawn")

What if Bruce Wayne was adopted by Ra's al Ghul?

 

[Aristotle]

1) Superman would have a weakness to lead instead of to kryptonite.
2) Deathstroke would have killed her for betraying him, and then would have proceeded to do everything else about the same.
3) Booster Gold handled that one, and basically said, metatextually, "WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER WANT THAT NO IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN."
4) After the Hush Returns arc, he literally cannot be Hush, but if he was...well, that would actually be a cool story. Chalk up ONE for this entire thread.
5) Been done.
6) I don't know, it probably woulda been about the same thing.
7) See Damian Wayne.

 

[Aristotle]

What if became paralyzed and could never put on the batsuit again?

I realized I forgot to tell the guy that this one has already been done too. They call it Knightfall/Knightquest/Knightsend.

Is it just me, or does DC do a lot more of these types of things in-continuity than Marvel does? Does that mean DC takes more risks, or are they just gimmicky?

What if Bruce Wayan went bankrupt?

Last year, I said this has been done before in a Batman annual. It is now, of course, about to be done again in Batman R.I.P.

Silly person, you know that the covers never represented what happened in there.

No, I mean more like Hyperion over in Marvel, where he grows up to hate humans and takes over the world. The JLA could become an underground revolutionary team.

Superman Red Son/Search for Ray Palmer Red Son.

What if... right before the catastrophic destruction of the Earth, Thomas Wayne sent his only son, Bruce, off into space in an experimental rocket that would eventually crash land on the far-off planet of Krypton?

Happened.

 

[The Question]

What if The Guardians Decided to accept the Magic Component of their power and Started a Magic Corp to run alongside the science? where you had one of each for each sector?

That would be kind of pointless. How would it be any different than having two GLs per sector?

 

[Aristotle]

No more pointless than 95% of the other Elseworlds and What Ifs out there.

EW/WI that had a point:
1) Kingdom Come
2) What If Civil War (even if I disagree PROFOUNDLY with the message)
3) Dark Knight Returns
4) In Darkest Knight
5) Superman Red Son
6) Marvel/DC crossovers in the mid-90s were EW (although JLA/Avengers wasn't)
7) Elseworlds 80-page Giant
8) What If Vol. 1 #29
9) What If Planet Hulk (if only because it lets me imagine a world in which WWH never got made.)

Not including The Golden Age or Batman Manbat, because they shouldn't be Elseworlds at all.

The Batman Vampire stories were cool, and League of Batmen was kind of fun, but both were basically pointless. What If Vol. 1 #33 is amazing because Dazzler as herald of Galactus is just an awesome idea, but not really much of a point to it.

Looking at a list of EW publications...HOLY **** BATMAN HAS A LOT OF ELSEWORLDS.

 

[fifthfiend]

I've always found the majority of Elseworlds and What Ifs to be pointless exercises.

You're seriously going to make me point out that these are superhero comic books, aren't you.

Look at that, you just did.



And honestly,

What if Bruce Wayne was adopted by Ra's al Ghul?

See Damian Wayne.

Damian Wayne? I can't even call that overreaching, that's like the comic books version of a Rickroll.

 

[fifthfiend]

Seriously though as far as this:

Silly person, you know that the covers never represented what happened in there.

No, I mean more like Hyperion over in Marvel, where he grows up to hate humans and takes over the world. The JLA could become an underground revolutionary team.

also happened: Superman Batman: Absolute Power

Superman Red Son/Search for Ray Palmer Red Son.

I can't believe nobody else has pointed out that they already told that exact same story about Superman, it was called Supreme Power. If you want to know what Superman would be like if he were more like Hyperion from Marvel, he would be Hyperion, from Marvel.

 

[Aristotle]

You're seriously going to make me point out that these are superhero comic books, aren't you.

Obviously, I meant that in the context of the DCU and MU. What's really gained, storywise, from asking What If The Avengers Had Faulty Mousetraps? or putting out an Elseworlds about what would have happened if the Waynes had lived in third-century Rome and Thomas died of syphilis?

Damian Wayne? I can't even call that overreaching, that's like the comic books version of a Rickroll.

Damian Wayne=worst parts of Ra's, Talia, and young Bruce. I do honestly think that Damian Wayne is what Bruce would have looked like if raised by Ra's.

 

[fifthfiend]

The thing of it is that you're substituting a caricature for a character. I mean you yourself are admitting as much in saying Damian is basically constructed out of the worst bits of those three different characters. The whole point of Batman is that his better angels are always there fighting against his darker impulses and a story like this would show him having to fight that same battle against himself but this time with a charismatic madman standing over him using three thousand years' worth of cunning to tip the scales.

If anything it'd play out as a mix of Batgirl's origins and Batman Begins. Ra's would try to raise him as a killer, but Bruce's underlying morality and mission to honor the memory of his real father would lead him to rebel and escape Al Ghul's control and seek his own destiny. You could even throw in a thing where Ra's takes control of Waynecorp so Bruce has to learn to be a hero without the limitless resources he might have had at his disposal, eventually returning to Gotham to finally wrest control of his city and his destiny from the hands of the Demon. Paul Dini would write it, it would be ****-hot and you'd buy six copies for yourself and one each for all of your friends.

 

[fifthfiend]

Obviously, I meant that in the context of the DCU and MU. What's really gained, storywise, from asking What If The Avengers Had Faulty Mousetraps? or putting out an Elseworlds about what would have happened if the Waynes had lived in third-century Rome and Thomas died of syphilis?

By selectively altering aspects of a character's circumstances and personality a writer can explore how all of those elements interact as a whole to produce that character as he is and throwing into relief those aspects of the character which are truly definitive while also making a larger exploration of of the mutability or immutability of individual nature and the course of history. Alternately sometimes it just presents an opportunity to tell an entertaining story which wouldn't fit into the constraints of a continuity-bounded universe.

 

[Aristotle]

Of course, but what I'm saying is that most of what is actually produced in the EW/WI genre is schlock. Obviously, I don't find fault in the idea of doing an EW or a WI, as suggested by my list of 9 EW/WI stories that felt like there was something narratively gained by their existing.

Kingdom Come, for one thing, ended up having a real impact on mainline continuity through The Kingdom's introduction of Hypertime. Beyond that, there was much more being discussed than the basic "What if this happened" scenario. The scenario was a means to a larger narrative end.

What If Civil War really allows Marvel to more fully explain why they believe Tony Stark was in the right in the Civil War. This allows them to more fully show us what would have happened if Tony hadn't been there. While I disagree that it would have played out that way, it's now canon, in a way, which sort of provides an internal moral justification for Stark's actions, although I just plain don't like futurism and the kinds of objectification/quantification of morality that it brings, so I still don't agree with Tony's actions. But What If Civil War provides an avenue for Marvel to basically plead their case.

Dark Knight Returns was, at the time it was made, suggested to be the future of Batman, and by extension, of the DCU. It made such waves because it resonated, as Charles Bronson's Death Wish movies did, with a helpless, primal, conservative/individualist/anarchist zeitgeist sweeping over America at the time. It was much more a story of its time than its characters.

In Darkest Knight simply answered a question that just about anyone who's ever been a fan of both Batman and Green Lantern had probably been asking themselves. And there's a good reason they'd been asking it: how does a character like Batman inhabit the fundamentally different role of Green Lantern? If In Darkest Knight had a flaw, it was that it didn't explore the question enough, whereas most EW/WI stories devote about 20 times too many pages to their questions.

Superman Red Son, of course, answers a question posed in this exact thread, and obviously a favorite of DC fans. Of course, Crime Syndicate stories had addressed this in their own way, but Ultraman was more the complete opposite of Superman in the sense that, just as Superman served the guiding morality ("good guys win") of his universe, so too did Ultraman serve the guiding morality ("bad guys win") of his universe. This was a Superman doing bad things for bad people in the name of many of the same ideals that the original Golden Age Superman championed. It was a fascinating exploration of the character in a way that Batman: Two Faces just never could be.

The large-scale Marvel/DC crossovers like Amalgam and All-Access and whatnot, again, were asking questions that fans had always had: what would it look like when the two universes collided? There wasn't much depth to the crossovers, but they were a lot of fun.

Elseworlds 80-Page Giant, if you can find a copy or a scan, is phenomenal in its updating and modernizing of the old Silver Age "imaginary stories." The "imaginary stories," in a way, were always closer to What Ifs than to Elseworlds. 80-Page Giant addressed the dangling questions left by those old tales in one fell swoop with the Super-Sons finale. It quickly moved back to typical Elseworlds/OOC storytelling with the Letitia Lerner story, and managed to tell the best All-Ages story that an All-Ages audience should never be allowed to see.

What If The Avengers Defeated Everybody sort of asks the same question that "Earth-Perfect" from Countdown did: if the DCU and MU could seriously just move forward from its status quo, what would a happy ending look like? Would it be fun?

What If Planet Hulk: What if the Hulk had landed on the planet the Illuminati intended for him? Well, a ****ty CW-ripoff-right-up-to-the-copout-ending crossover wouldn't have been made!

 

[fifthfiend]

most of what is actually produced in the EW/WI genre is schlock.

Again, super hero comic books.

I think we're mostly just arguing at corss-purposes here. Your standpoint seems to be that a what-if should fulfill some sort of narrative purpose in relation to the larger in-continuity universe, whereas what I mainly like about them is their opportunity to say **** the in-continuity universe, we're having Reed Richards be a gigantic floating brain. And Ben Grimm grows wings! And I don't know what happened with Johnny but Sue leaves Reed for Ben (cause what's a girl gonna do with a giant disembodied brain?) and in the end they still all team together to defeat Doctor Doom, who I think was a werewolf or a Skrull or something. Oh! Or that one where Sue gives birth to an Alien that eats the entire FF.

Basically what I'm saying is I don't ask anything more out of a what-if than I ask out of any comic book, which is that it keep me entertained for the length of time that it takes to read a comic book. I mean I've paid money for an in-continuity comic where Superman's surgically removed tumor takes his seat in hell as a result of the diabolical machinations of Guy Gardner, I don't have any business judging anyone for being unnecessary.

 

[Kitsune]

What if Joe Q was at DC and Dan Didio was at Marvel?