Titles include Batman the Barbarian, Batman:Nightfire, Gotham by Gaslight: The Kryptonian Age, Green Lantern: Dark, Dark Knights of Steel: Allwinter and DC vs. Vampires: World War V
Out-of-continuity stories have always been a pillar of DC publishing, granting creators the ability to explore all the wild corners of the DC Universe,” said DC Executive Editor Ben Abernathy. “We’re excited to bring a whole new slate of titles under the ELSEWORLDS banner in 2024, combining some all-new titles from top storytellers, as well as sequels from the current DC line that fit that same out-of-continuity aesthetic.
Some pretty interesting looking stuff! Hard to guage without having more of an idea what the books are about, but I’m definitely curious about all of them.
I love love love Elseworlds! Looking forward to this.
I have so many Batman Elseworlds from high school and college. Batman works really well in the Elseworlds concept. Simple origin story so the question is what would happen in this different time and place?
(I don’t see a tiara, but I see bracelets and blood so yeah, I am down for this).
Oh, nice! I loved me all the Elseworlds Annuals and one-shots. Kind of wish we’d get new worlds for each one instead of revisiting past worlds, but I’m down for almost all of these, even though they’re part of the Multiverse now and “Elseworlds” seems an unnecessary tag.
From what I understand, Black Label is sort of a mix of Elseworlds, All-Star, and Vertigo.
Like, we see some alternate version of characters in Black Label, such as White Knight and such, but many of these books are also supposed to be considered the “big books by the biggest creators without adhearing to continuity,” such as Batman: Three Jokers or Batman: Damned. Some of the most acclaimed books have even been retroactively put in Black Label, like All-Star Superman, The New Frontier and Joker. We’ve even seen creator owned books put there ala Vertigo, such as The Nice House on the Lake, American Vampire and Fables.
I mean…I guess? In the end I just really care if it’s good comics are not. The label on it, whether it’s capital L or lower-case l doesn’t matter that much to me.
I imagine if anything it’s more the other way around – the Elseworlds comics are capitalizing on the upcoming Elseworlds movies. That is, of course, presuming that they even get a separate Elseworlds moniker.
I kind of get the feeling that the Elseworlds brand is less in the spirit of legacy Elseworlds and more the spiritual successor of the Multiversity brand (Teen Justice and Harley Screws up the DCU). Essentially branching away from the story of Multiversity and just using it to tag stories that aren’t from the “common crossover” Earths (0, 2, 3, X).
I’m sure there will be overlap between Black Label and Elseworlds, but it seems like Elseworlds is building more continuity in each of these worlds; we’re continuing the stories from one-shots that were once simply “not in continuity.” While Black Label is explicitly not trying to do that, but tell a story and be done. (Save for the Murphyverse, which seems like it might be prime to jump to Elseworlds, though I think there’s an allure to the BL prestige format in that case…)
As @Jay_Kay and @chintzybeatnik have both commented, the marketing angle is certainly an effort to align more with the branding of the film universe. Makes sense for someone who sees an “Elseworlds” movie to be able to find an “Elseworlds” book when they walk into their first comic shop.
