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.