I forgot…develops an archenemy whose identity is hidden, but with the Batman, the only man he trusts with his secrets, the World’s Finest Team capture this villain.
Batman: “Who is he?”
Lex: “The most dangerous man alive.”
(Pulls mask off. Reveals a young Lex Luthor. End issue #8)
Identified within an hour; I love the Dope!
“What if… Longshot wielded the power of Thor?”
A: A very, very impressive mullet, that’s what if.
More interesting perhaps is what if Ghost Rider possessed the power of Thor?
Elseworld stories about Green Lantern’s power ring going to someone else other than Hal Jordan are easy to contemplate. But, assume Abin Sur survived his crash, and went back into space to do his job properly (patrol all of sector 2814 instead of hang out on Earth). With no Earth-centric Green Lantern and Hal Jordan just a pilot, we have no Green Lantern in the Justice League, no Parallax, no re-ignition of the Sun, no Hal Jordan Spectre, no Kyle Rayner, and so on. We probably have Krona or Nekron lording over much of the universe, too.
Wish I could remember the name of the one shot parody with The Envelope, a man emotionally scarred by an envelope.
Mad’s Batman parody had a baseball bat as a logo which I thought was funny…
I always loved this homage, which starts off as too sincere and promptly wanders off. (“Some moron threw it!”)
There was a multi-part story (not comic) about this some time back in one of the glossy “fanzines.” It wasn’t Alter-Ego. It told the story of what happened if M C Gaines bought out National rather than National buying out All American. Flash and Green Lantern continue on, but Superman and Batman get canceled. Wish I could find a link.
It seems this was called “The Secret History of All American Comics” by Bob Rozakis. It appeared in some issues of Alter Ego around #80 as well as contemporaneous issues of Back Issue both from TwoMorrows.
Well, Dial H had Open Window Man*: after his parents were killed he gazed at night out of an open window planning his crusade against villainy, and was struck by an inspiration.
*His powers are actually pretty useful: he can use any open window anywhere as a portal to any other open window. Even a picture of a window will do, as long as it’s open.
OldGuy are you the OldGuy from the DCMBs in the early 200s? That is a pretty impressive citation.
DC’s Bombshells features Batwoman, who is a member of the WW2 Women’s Baseball League and knocks out adversaries with a baseball bat.
Actually, that episode has Lex and the Legion of Doom going back in time to replace certain heroes. Lex convinces Hal to get out of his test rocket seconds before Abin Sur lanterns it to his crash site. Also, Cheetah wins the Paradise Island tournament to become Wonder Woman, and Kal-El’s rocket is knocked off course soon after it leaves Krypton.
So really, that’s Abin Sur’s fault for not checking ID. 
There was a great Elseworlds title called Riddle of the Beast that threw everything into a high-fantasy world, with the main character being an orphan boy named Robin Drake. That story is everything I love about Elseworlds titles. I would like to see more stories set in that world.
Surgeon mummy Plato trenchcoat guy’s name is “Hush”, because that makes sense!
There actually is a character like this in Marshall Law called “The Private Eye”. The super-heroic alter-ego of billionaire Scott Brennan (although the Marshall remarks scoffingly at one point that his “secret identity” is the worst-kept secret in San Futuro), Private Eye had his family’s faithful butler murder his parents in front of him in a dark alley, and uses hidden evidence of this to blackmail the butler into eternal servitude.
Private Eye also has a sidekick, “Emergency Ward”, who, in a grim jab at DC’s A Death in the Family, seems to die both tragically and frequently. Private Eye orchestrates these deaths not to increase comic book sales, but to ensure that doctors can harvest the Emergency Wards’ organs and keep Private Eye fit and healthy.
Batman has turned the Justice League into totalitarian dictators, it’s up to the Joker and a small band of re-imagined supervillains to stop them. Actually sort of like Suicide Squad except your actually rooting for the villains.
What if… Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive pigeon?
And you think all that webbing leaves a mess all over town…
I’ve also had a few Batman micro-“what ifs” come to mind, over the years—mostly when I was bored, or waiting in line, or something. Like…
-Joe Chill used a jackknife, not a gun. (I was calling this one the “NRA Batman”)
Or,
-A character-driven one where Bruce’s parents were badly wounded, but not actually killed in that mugging. So, you might have a shaken but not completely traumatized Bruce, inspired to combat crime, but not as “Batman,” or a considerably mellower Bat, and very possibly thus a considerably less capable one, as he’d had less obsessive drive and even less of an excuse to spend years obsessively molding himself into The Dark Knight.
Thus, a situation where Gotham and the JL has a Batman closer in attitude to the 60s version, or the modern Flash.
And, if you wanted to play up the comedic angle, Batman living in his parents’ basement. Or having to juggle a charade of mild-mannered Bruce Wayne and his duties as Batman when his folks are in-town visiting from Key West. 
Or,
-Baby Kal-El’s rocket crashes on the Wayne Estate, with the happy couple of course deciding to adopt him—it’ll be easier to cover up, too, as Martha had just gone into labor, they can just claim she’d had twin boys.
Or, to be really screwy, Baby Kal-El’s rocket crashes on the Wayne Estate…and Batman decides to adopt and raise the alien foundling as his ward.
Alan Brennert beat you to it, in DETECTIVE #500: the Phantom Stranger takes Batman and Robin on a journey to another world – one where Thomas and Martha Wayne will soon be murdered by a mugger, leaving an orphaned Bruce to grow up bitter and alone and swearing vengeance against criminals and angry all his life.
Batman of course wants to prevent that horrifying crime, but Robin keeps arguing that this world is going to need a Batman, who could accomplish a great deal of good: stopping so many other criminals, saving so many other lives. Heck, look at this star chart: this is apparently a parallel universe where there never even was a Krypton! This world may need a Batman more than ours does!
At the last moment, our hero ultimately chooses to save the Waynes – and returns to his own world, never to know the fate of the kid. We, though, do: he learned what death was, in that alley; and learned that it could be averted. And we see him hitting the books and hitting the gym, studying criminology and spinning through the air: he’s going to choose the exact same path, but not out of grief or guilt or vengeance; out of awe, and mystery, and gratitude.
Quoth his father, “Maybe we ought to get mugged more often.”
Not particularly, no.
More like the certain versions of the Crime Syndicate, the Justice Lords, or the Injustice Justice League. Or even the Squadron Supreme.
Also sort of been done…at least once, as I’m pretty sure there was at least a short story where the Waynes raised Kal alongside Bruce. (Maybe it was a single-page in a special/annual?)
I wonder if the Joker ever had a lucid moment and actually sided with Batman (or acted as a crime-fighter on his own), to fight some evil entity that even he could not tolerate?
Happened in the BATMAN/CAPTAIN AMERICA team-up: the Red Skull gets halfway through his plan to deploy the [del]Manhattan Project’s[/del] Gotham Project’s atomic bomb against an American city before – well, as the Joker puts it, “I may be a criminal lunatic, but I’m an American criminal lunatic!”
Oh, I never saw that; gotta link?
