I know my way around Comic Books. I've had a Comic Book Store since 1992 and I've read since then around 15-20 issues per week, mostly to be able to sell those titles to my customers and to make them fall in love with the stories so they become avid readers and thus, avid buyers.
This is a new section of my blog where I'll make some comic book reviews and recommend some titles to anyone reading my entries.
"In other world, superheroes are taken from their normal scenery and are taken to other worlds, time and strange place - some have existed before, some others have never been real, and there are those places that can't couldn't and shouldn't exist. The stories resulting from this kind of scenarios are those that makes our usual characters who are well known to us to seem fresh, renewed and somehow, new to us."
That's some paraphrasing of the introduction of Elseworlds, an editorial brand from DC Comics. The creative media it's one made up by ideas and posibilities; for a long time, DC explored this type of stories were explored as Infinite Earths until in 1986, they decided to organize them and sort them out with the Saga Crisis on Infinite Earths.
With this, the idea was to have one version for each character to avoid confusion to new readers, but the stories were already there... what would happen if Batman was set in the Victorian Era?, What would've happened if Supeman had landed in Gotham city instead near Metropolis?, Or what about if Abin Sur had chosen Lex Luthor instead of Hal Jordan to be Green Lantern?
How could those stories be told without going back to the mess DC had before 1986?
That problem is solved by the ELSEWORLDS saga. An editorial branch of DC that means that any story with the stamp elseworlds in the cover, is not canon and doesn't affect the original storyline, it's just an imaginary story, sort of a what if?, which is a little bit ironic since comic books are pure fiction and the storylines are mere imagination from the authors.
The branch Elseworlds was born in 1989 but it became official until the early 90's. There are many great stories and there are also some that lack flavor and punch, but most of them are good and the creative aspect of them is good, to say the least. Some of these stories have been that good that DC decided to make them Canon and to include them in the original and main storyline of the character or the universe, which means that these stories happened, had happened or will happen, which in the end would reactivate the Multiverse and the Metaverse in the long run, but these posts are not about that, so worry not.
-- HOLY TERROR --
If Bruce Wayne lived in a different world, one where the church and the faith governs and controls everything and anything... would his life have been different? Would his parents have been killed by a Jon Doe in an alley, and then would he have turned into Batman?
What if in that world the government had been responsible from his parents' death and from the creation of a symbol of hope to the people?
With the art of Norm Breyfogles this is the first title to carry the Elseworld brand and it is definitely a fan favorite and decidedly an issue that every comic book fan and DC comics fan should give a read at some point.
