new Universe. Later, under a special publishing deal with Milestone Media, DC Comics published a new series of comic books that told the stories of the heroes living in Dakota City, formed mostly by African American superheroes and other minorities. These characters lived in a universe separated from the DC Universe (known as the Dakotaverse or Milestone Universe). The event known as Worlds Collide presented one of the first modern intercompany crossovers within the established continuity of the Universes instead of being "imaginary" and showed that there could be other universes or even multiverses outside the new DC Universe. In a similar way to Worlds Collide, the crossover event DC vs. Marvel showed another in-continuity crossover with another reality completely separated from the DC Universe and that has a Multiverse of its own: the universe of Earth-616 in the Marvel Multiverse. The universes were rarely referred to with specific names within the stories but were named in the "Real World" (both officially and unofficially) using the name of the editorial, imprint or even an element in particular. While in the comic books the concept of a "real" Multiverse was avoided, the Multiverse played an important role in cartoon series and live-action shows (see Other versions). In summary, from 1986 to 1999, everything not happening in the "mainstream" continuity appearing in DC comics was either a non-canonical story or happened in a completely different and separate reality/universe/multiverse. In 1999, the unexpected and overwhelming success of Elseworlds' Kingdom Come and other stories, led to the creation of the concept known as Hypertime in order to publish crossovers with those characters and the mainstream continuity. This structure gave "existence" to alternate timelines, stories in Elseworlds, appearances in other media and any other appearance of DC characters in the past. The main timeline or "Central Timeline" was like a river and all of the alternate stories were branches of it. Hypertime was similar to the former Multiverse as it allowed each and every reality ever published to co-exist and interact as most branches tend to return to the original stream (explaining some retcons as well as crossovers). However, all realities existed within only one Universe. WildStorm Originally, the stories appearing in WildStorm Productions' comic books occurred in a universe that was part of the Image Universe along with other characters appearing in Image Comics publications. It was separated from it during the event called