Brightburn, opening this Friday, takes arguably the most well-known superhero origin story — Superman’s — and puts it through a very dark, very bloody lens.
The Breyers (lead by matriarch Elizabeth Banks) adopt an infant that seemingly comes from the stars. But when their new son manifests special superpower-like abilities, they start to realize he’s not here to use them for good but rather for the other thing. The movie takes the “What if Superman came to Earth and was evil?” elevator pitch and pushes it to a very terrifying, R-rated place. While this is the first time such material has been tackled on the big screen, fans have seen a version of this type of “darker” material before: DC’s Elseworlds.
Elseworlds is a line of DC Comics which takes their most popular stories and tweaks them with a “What If…?” twist. These changes can range from setting characters in a new time to replacing a character within their own origin story. You could call them “imaginary stories,” but then again, Bart Simpson said it best, “Aren’t they all imaginary?” Here are some of Elseworlds’ most famous tales that you should definitely read after watching Brightburn.
‘Superman: Red Son’ by Mark Millar
(Credit: DC)
Instead of landing in Smallville, Kansas, this Superman story posits what if the Man of Steel crashed in the Ukraine.
Raised to live and enforce the ideals of the Soviet Union, Superman consistently goes head-to-head with the United States and their greatest scientist, Lex Luthor. Red Son finds Superman eventually heading up the Soviet Government, and while turning it and most of the world into a utopia, it comes at the cost of free will. Unlike previous Supes storylines, Red Son provides a deliberate and rich commentary on how politics — especially American vs. Russian — impact our lives, especially from the point of view of a being that can fire heat rays from his eyes.
‘Superman: Speeding Bullets’ by J.M. DeMatteis and Eduardo Barreto
Among the wreckage of a crashed alien craft, Thomas and Martha Wayne discover an infant and name him Bruce. Years later, Thomas and Martha are gunned down by a mugger. The anger and rage inside young Bruce Wayne ends up activating latent superpowers he didn’t know he had — and they first manifest in the form of vaporizing his parents’ killer with heat vision.
Speeding Bullets is a gripping, alternate take on Batman — investing the Dark Knight with Superman’s powers in a way that gives us a new and unsettling version of Batman.
‘In Darkest Night’ by Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham
In Frank Miller’s Batman Year One, Bruce Wayne’s first foray into crime fighting — before he would put on the Batsuit –was an epic fail. After getting in a fight with Selina Kyle and getting stabbed in the leg, he returns defeated to Wayne Manor. There, he sees a bat fly through his window and realizes what he must do to strike fear in the heart of Gotham’s criminals.
Darkest Knight picks up with Bruce’s trip home, but instead of finding his calling with a bat, he meets Abin Sur — the Green Lantern Corps member. Bruce gets the Hal Jordan/Green Lantern treatment here, with Sur dying and passing on his power ring to Batman. From there, the Caped Crusader wields Green Lantern energy as he fights crime in Gotham City. Batman has always shown a sense of pride (some might even call it arrogance) for the fact he doesn’t have superpowers. But Darkest Knight explores how Batman’s world would change if the thing Hal Jordan saw as a gift ended up being a curse.
‘Gotham by Gaslight’ by Brian Augustyn, Mike Mignola, and P. Craig Russell
(Credit: DC)
In this first Elseworlds tale from 1989, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham — circa 1889 — after spending years abroad. With crime on a steady rise in Gotham, Bruce takes up the mantle of the Batman to stop it. Soon, the Dark Knight finds himself on the trail of murderer whose methods have a bloody resemblance to the first serial killer ever: Jack the Ripper.
It’s the world’s greatest detective vs. the world’s most infamous murderer. We already have an animated version, but this needs to be a DC live-action movie right now. Too bad it’s probably not going to be the Robert Pattinson-Matt Reeves collaboration, because that would be amazing.
Here’s hoping Brightburn finds enough success at the box office to inspire more studios to take outside-the-box swings like this with their IP.
