But I need to go off on this tangent, instead. The matter of Imaginary Stories, Elseworlds, and What Ifs is kinda interesting, because what you say about the reinforcement of the primacy of canon is absolutely true, and yet there are wrinkles. Imaginary Stories were in all respects well-formed for their time — it was just that they flirted with the termination of seriality and so had to be “explained away”. That was quite a feat of necessity, actually, considering the byzantine ins-and-outs of the “official” stories, and the crazy shit they swallowed and digested all the time! But that just meant that after a while, anything might be an Imaginary Story if the editor didn’t like it. So they’d label them — “This is an Imaginary Story” — on a case-by-case basis, until Imaginary Stories became something like a brand within the brand.

“What If” was an interestingly typical Roy Thomas-style reaction to this: a way for Marvel to have imaginary stories too, but also to make them count. What happened in “What If” was (at least at first) presented to us not only as what really would have happened if things had gone differently, but as what did happen when things actually went differently…and so it also revealed things which were “true” about the Marvel Universe, that couldn’t be shown in the regular books. For example, in “What If The Fantastic Four All Had Different Powers”, it’s made explicit that the cosmic rays gave the FF powers consistent with their self-image and personality traits…by pointing out that they all had self-images and personality traits that could’ve been inflected a different way, while still producing a credible FF. High-intellect Reed Richards gradually turns into a big brain, gearhead Johnny Storm turns into a machine-man, pilot Ben Grimm grows wings…damn, can’t remember what happened to Sue…but anyway there it is: the question of why the FF got the powers they did is explained by showing how they could’ve gotten different ones, and this counts…

Although sure: they all didn’t count. But that’s only because the conceit of divergent universes slipped its leash. And things got problematic in a hurry, since Marvel maintained a standard time-travel plot in addition to the more modern-seeming divergent-universe explanation. Still, even as late as “What If The Avengers Hadn’t Beaten Korvac”, the “What If” mag was still introducing new and instantly-canonical (!) details to the main Universe it served — in fact as I see it the whole problem with what “What If” turned into is that they were the only stories that could not be explained away as “imaginary”, “mistaken”, or otherwise wrong…because they couldn’t be contradicted, corrected, or retconned once they’d been written, but always carried the burden of being “real”. And so when this began to be forgotten or ignored, “What If” just started to reinforce existing canon full stop, its stories arguably becoming far worse than “Imaginary”. Fake, is what they became: until divergent universes could even flatly contradict one another’s differences, by the end of it. Just a mess. “This is an imaginary story” became an epithet to hurl at “What If”, rather than an invitation to read it. Exactly contrary to the damn rasion d’etre of the thing!

Maddening.

Then, finally, there was Elseworlds, which was just all Imaginary all the time…except that the stories didn’t have to be well-formed-merely-forbidden as they once were (didn’t have to be in the poorly-formed-but-permitted “What If” style either), but they could just be straight departures. The most annoying of these, to me, was the Superman-As-Mowgli story…even worse than “what if Batman was, like, a real vampire”, though still managing to be less insulting than the “what if Wolverine was the Messiah”-type stuff that Marvel was getting into by this time. Because at least it wasn’t supposed to be “real”, wasn’t supposed to function as a commentary on mainline continuity and character. Except in the manner you describe, of course — Sir Clark and Lady Lois and all that crap, ha! I mean, it was bad enough as that — what possible worth could there be in replacing Mowgli with Superman? But it had a potential, even as nonsense, that Marvel’s bad “What If”s lacked — if done another way, a smarter way or a more artistically-inspired way, there could’ve conceivably been a point to such “Elseworlds” stories. In the right hands, Superman-As-Mowgli might’ve been a wonderful surprise! Once “What If” turned sour, though, it couldn’t make anything but soulless junk, because there was very little point to any of it in the first place. DC put out a hardcover of Imaginary Stories a couple of years ago, and it was great, because the stories were still just regular stories, and they were fun and readable and made whatever amount of minimum sense they had to in order to be that way. But I have trouble envisioning the second volume of “What If” finding any sort of prestige appeal in a big hardcover…and to bundle a whole bunch of “Elseworlds” together, wow, I don’t know, I think it’d feel like sitting some sort of test: “if I just say that I accept the eternal nature of the innate nobility of Superman, can I leave early?” But it isn’t hard to imagine a hardcover collection of, say, Wednesday Comics, and naturally those are Elseworlds, those are Imaginary Stories, and yet it doesn’t matter, they don’t need the label…because the format makes it clear what they are from the outset.

(I’ve never read “Red Son”, but I imagine the reason people speak so highly of it is that it did need the label, because it also intended to use it for something…to mark something out with it, for a purpose.)

So for me, it all comes down to what necessity there is for the labelling. I believe Weisinger originally employed the term “Imaginary Story” to shut nitpickly letter-writers up, before it became apparent that you could bill a Superman comic as containing an Imaginary Story…above, I said that anything the ditor didn’t like could be an IS, but I guess I said that backwards: it was anything the readership didn’t like that you could call “imaginary”, just to get them off your back, and then it turned into a case where anything the readership wouldn’t like, you could sell to them anyway as “imaginary”, and they’d eat it up regardless. Marvel tried to invert this with “What If”; when “Elseworlds” came along they didn’t even make any pretense about it; Wednesday Comics simply leaves the whole business to one side.

I don’t know…those differences just interest me, I guess.

END OF RANT!