Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale followed their Halloween specials with a thirteen-issue murder mystery set during Batman’s early years, when Gotham still belonged to the Falcone family and the costumed criminals were only beginning to appear. It was conceived as a direct sequel to Frank Miller’s Year One and became the template for a generation of Batman crime stories. The Long Halloween is one of the few Batman stories that works equally as detective fiction and as tragedy: the mystery holds up, but the real subject is a good man being destroyed in slow motion. Tim Sale’s silhouettes and Gregory Wright’s seasonal colour make each chapter feel like a different month. It is the book Christopher Nolan drew on most heavily for The Dark Knight, and it remains the standard recommendation for a reader’s second Batman purchase after Year One.

Before The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale produced three Halloween specials for Legends of the Dark Knight between 1993 and 1995. They are where the pair worked out the seasonal structure and noir framing that would define their later work together. Haunted Knight is short, and that is its strength: three complete stories that show Loeb and Sale finding their voice in real time. Read before The Long Halloween it supplies context; read after it works as a set of character studies about fear and obligation. For collectors of the Loeb/Sale run, it is the missing first volume.

In 1988 DC set up a 900 number and let readers vote on whether Jason Todd, the second Robin, would survive. By a margin of 72 votes out of more than ten thousand, they chose to kill him. Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo wrote and drew the outcome, and DC did not reverse it for almost twenty years. Pairing the two arcs is the point: the first shows the cost, the second shows what Batman becomes without it. Read together they explain why Batman spent two decades unable to talk about Jason, and they set up Under the Red Hood directly. This is foundational continuity rather than a curiosity, and the deluxe format is the cleanest way to own it.

Sean Gordon Murphy pitched a Batman story set outside continuity and was given something rare: full control of script and art, and a Gotham of his own that DC has since expanded into a whole line. White Knight is the strongest recent entry point for a reader with no Batman background: no crossovers, no prior reading, one authorial voice on script and art. It also commits to its argument instead of walking it back in the last chapter, which is rare for a Batman story that questions Batman.

The Black Mirror was Scott Snyder’s first major DC work, published while Bruce Wayne was absent and Dick Grayson was wearing the cowl. It established Snyder as a Batman writer and led directly to his New 52 run with Greg Capullo. This is Gotham written as horror rather than crime: the threat is a quiet, articulate young man who explains himself calmly, and the tension comes from a father who already knows what his son is. It also makes the strongest case ever published for Dick Grayson as Batman, which is why it stands alone even for readers who skip the surrounding continuity.

The Killing Joke was published in 1988 as a one-shot in which the Joker sets out to prove that one bad day is all it takes to break anyone. Bolland finishes his own art and the control is the point: the Joker is terrifying because the drawing never flinches. The recolouring is genuinely different from the 1988 version, flatter, colder, with the flashbacks in near-monochrome, and it is the reason this edition exists. It remains the most cited Joker story ever published.

Batman and Spawn crossed over twice in 1994, once from each publisher, with Frank Miller and Doug Moench writing and Todd McFarlane and Klaus Janson drawing. The 1994 books are a document of the moment Image was outselling DC and the two companies had to negotiate as equals. The 2022 one-shot is the reason to buy it now: McFarlane and Capullo, the two definitive Spawn and Batman artists, on the same book for the first time.

Grant Morrison and Mark Millar wrote The Flash together in the late nineties, immediately after Mark Waid, with Wally West already established as the fastest man alive. The Human Race is the standout: an alien gambler challenges the Flash to a race across the universe with Earth as the stake, and Morrison writes it as pure high concept. The Black Flash, death itself, running to catch up, is the other lasting idea, and DC has used it ever since.

Green Arrow by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino: The Deluxe Edition collects the run that rescued Green Arrow from the worst stretch of the New 52 and turned him into something closer to a myth. Lemire strips Oliver Queen of his money and his gadgets, sends him back to the island, and reveals an ancient conflict of totem clans behind the bow. Sorrentino's fractured page layouts are the reason people still talk about it.

In 1992 DC killed Superman and the story made the evening news. Thirty years later this edition collects it as a single book. Doomsday is the rare villain who works precisely because he has no personality, no motive, no dialogue, just forward motion, and the escalating panel counts across the final issues are one of the smartest formal tricks in mainstream comics. Whatever you think of the stunt, it is the best-selling comic story ever published.

Begun in black and white for a British anthology in 1982 and finished in colour for DC, V for Vendetta sets anarchy against fascism in a near-future Britain. Moore refuses to make his protagonist comfortable: V is a terrorist and the book never resolves that for the reader. David Lloyd stripped out sound effects, thought balloons and motion lines, leaving only what a camera would catch. The Guy Fawkes mask left the book and entered the street, which very few comics can claim.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took a set of discarded Charlton characters in 1986 and used them to ask what costumed power would actually do to a country. The nine-panel grid, the recurring symbols and the symmetry of chapter five make the structure part of the argument, and the prose sections are not optional, they carry a third of the story. Watchmen is the book almost every deconstruction since is answering, and the deluxe format restores John Higgins' colour choices that cheap paper flattened.

Tom Taylor's DCeased delivers the Anti-Life Equation as a digital virus and lets it move through the Justice League at the speed of their own abilities. The horror comes from competence turned against itself: Superman flies, so the infection flies. Unlike most zombie crossovers Taylor writes the losses as losses, spending pages on relationships before he destroys them. It needs no continuity and it is the best-selling book of its kind DC has published.

Nightwing: Year One tells the story DC had left as a gap for twenty years: how Dick Grayson stopped being Robin and became something of his own. Chuck Dixon wrote Nightwing for a decade and this is his retrospective origin: Batman fires Dick, and the story is about a young man discovering that being cut loose is the best thing that could have happened. Scott McDaniel draws movement better than anyone who has handled the character since.

Having established his own Gotham in White Knight, Sean Gordon Murphy widened the story from a municipal argument to a historical one, turning the attack on the Wayne family name itself. The first book asked whether Batman helps Gotham; this one asks what Gotham was built on, which is a harder question and a better sequel. Murphy again handles script and art, so the escalation never loses the visual identity that made the first volume work.

The Man Who Laughs is Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke's account of Batman's first encounter with the Joker, written as a direct continuation of Frank Miller's Year One. Brubaker writes the Joker as a public health emergency rather than a nemesis, poisoned reservoirs, televised threats, a city that does not yet know what it is dealing with, and Mahnke draws the victims' faces, which is the detail everyone remembers. Made of Wood is the other draw: a genuine detective story with the Golden Age Green Lantern.

Under the Red Hood undid the most permanent death in Batman’s history. Judd Winick brought Jason Todd back not as a redemption story but as an indictment, and the arc has shaped every Batman and Robin story written since. Winick refuses to let Batman answer that question comfortably, and the book is stronger for it. At 544 pages this is the complete storyline rather than the abridged version, including Annual #25’s explanation of the resurrection, and it reads as the direct sequel to A Death in the Family.

Batman: Arkham Asylum The Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's painted graphic novel, one of the strangest and best-selling Batman books ever published. On April Fool's Day the inmates take the asylum and demand Batman walk in alone; interleaved with that night is the diary of Amadeus Arkham, the psychologist who built the place after his mother's death. McKean's mixed-media artwork, paint, photography and collage, makes it unlike any other Batman comic.

All-Star Batman by Scott Snyder: The Deluxe Edition collects Snyder's complete post-New 52 run, in which he hands Batman a different A-list artist every arc and sends him out of Gotham. It opens with Batman driving Two-Face across the country while every bounty hunter and civilian in America tries to stop him, and keeps escalating from there. Art by John Romita Jr., Jock, Sean Murphy, Afua Richardson, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Tula Lotay.

Batman: The Cult Deluxe Edition collects Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson's brutal 1988 mini-series, back in print for the first time in over a decade. Batman is captured by Deacon Blackfire, a charismatic preacher building an army in Gotham's sewers, and is starved, drugged and broken until he begins to believe. It is the story of Batman losing, and of what it costs him to come back.

Batman: Sword of Azrael Deluxe Edition collects the origin of Jean-Paul Valley, the assassin conditioned from birth by the Order of St. Dumas and destined to wear the cowl. Written by Dennis O'Neil and drawn by a young Joe Quesada, it is the book that set up Knightfall, and the reason the man who replaced Batman was never going to give the job back quietly.

The Batman Who Laughs: The Deluxe Edition collects Scott Snyder and Jock's New York Times bestselling mini-series, in which the Batman of a dead universe — infected by the Joker's toxin and gifted with the ability to think exactly like him — comes to the main DC Earth with a plan for Bruce Wayne specifically. Includes The Grim Knight, the origin of his equally lethal lieutenant.

Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo: The Deluxe Edition collects Marc Silvestri's series, in which Batman and the Joker are forced to work together after Gordon is kidnapped and Harley Quinn goes missing. Silvestri writes and draws, which he rarely does.

Detective Comics #1000: The Deluxe Edition collects the thousandth issue of the longest-running comic in America, with short stories by most of the writers and artists who have defined Batman over the last forty years.