DC have a long and storied tradition of Elseworlds comics, but one of the best to emerge in recent memory didn't come from the comics medium at all.
Developed by NetherRealm Studios in 2013, Injustice: Gods Among Us gave DC fans a glimpse of what a world where Superman became a tyrant would actually look like. The results were horrifying, as the Man of Steel ruthlessly stamped out all forms of resistance wherever it emerged, to the point of even murdering Billy Batson in one of the most brutal sequences in DC history ever committed to screens.
The Injustice-verse is brutally unforgiving, and illustrative of how straight-up scary it is to contemplate how certain heroes could turn evil given the necessary push. In this case, it's because the Joker destroys the entirety of Metropolis and tricks Supes into murdering a pregnant Lois Lane, which prompts him to start his own fascist dictatorship alongside the most fickle figures amongst the JLA.
Batman then heads up a resistance of his own, and the results are pretty spellbinding - whether you're playing the game or reading the Tom Taylor comic.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
