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Best of the Else(Worlds)! Talking about What If stories

gogglebob

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
What are your favorite "alternate takes" on established fictions/universes?

After religiously devouring every DC/Marvel release for like a decade, I realize I have now "lapsed" and only really seek out "elseworld/what if" stories that seem interesting. I was always a fan of Exiles back in the day (in short, a series that follows a group of X-Men that visit alternate universes) and I always enjoyed alternate take stuff like Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier and alike, but now I feel like the only thing that gets my attention is a world where all your favorite heroes are zombies, or Batman is the last superhero alive in a world where the villains finally won. Or maybe it's Wolverine? Whatever! If it's an interesting twist on a heroic archetype that doesn't wholly rely on continuity, I'm there!

Point is I like What If/Elseworld type stories, and I bet others do, too. What are your favorite "what if" stories?

(And I am mostly thinking about comic books here, but this thread is open to anything from any other universe.)
 
Octopus Prime

Octopus Prime

Mystery Contraption
(He/Him)
I really liked Marvels original What If run, when I read a bunch of them a few years ago, even if the answer to the question would, more often than not, be “Everyone Would Die”. But even then, we had some GOAT contenders.

I saw the climax to one of them (What if Captain America was unfrozen TODAY) seemingly every week during the previous presidential term

And What if The Invisible Woman DIED, setting aside the fridging of my favourite comic book mom, did the impossible and made me sympathetic to Lee-era Reed Richards (and... err... Annihilus) as a guy who was completely destroyed by the death of his wife.

Also the story about Ben Parker surviving was built around the fact that Peter and Ben don’t actually like each other very much and kind of implied that 616 Pete doesn’t dwell on that
 
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