Elseworlds is the publication imprint for a group of comic books produced by DC Comics that take place outside the company's canon. The imprint presents narratives in which existing characters, such as Batman, or storylines are introduced to an entirely new idea or concept. The "Elseworlds" name was copyrighted in 1989, the same year as the first Elseworlds publication, and supplanted the previous Imaginary Stories series that employed the same premise.

Unlike its Marvel Comics counterpart What If...?, which bases its stories on a single point of divergence from the regular continuity, most Elseworlds stories instead take place in entirely self-contained continuities, with the only connection to the canon DC continuity being the presence of familiar DC characters.

From the beginnings of the comic book format adventure story characters such as Batman and Superman have been presented in different interpretations. Sometimes as humourous cartoons with very little logic to the story, sometimes as more substantial works of fantasy fiction where continuity matters. For several years from 1942 to the mid-1980s, particularly during the 1960s Silver Age of Comic Books era, DC Comics began to make a distinction between the "real" continuity of the most popular characters and the stories with even wilder flights of fancy which did not need to fit that continuity. These latter were called “Imaginary Stories” and the very first was “Superman, Cartoon Hero!”