Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

In 2011 DC cancelled its entire line and restarted fifty two titles from issue one on the same day. Ten years later this anniversary volume collects the first issues that mattered, which is the only honest way to look at a relaunch that produced both Snyder's Batman and a lot of things nobody finished.

All the greatest DC heroes from across time and space join forces to stop a being more powerful than any they've ever faced--a mysterious being known as the Anti-Monitor who has begun a crusade across time to bring about the end of all existence.35 YEARS AGO, WORLDS LIVED, WORLDS DIED-- AND COMICS WERE NEVER THE SAME.

Welcome to Elseworlds, heroes you know, worlds you don’t! This special line of comics reinvasions classic DC heroes in wildly different universes and contexts. In Dark Knights of Steel, readers get a chance to meet the familiar heroes of the Justice League in a medieval fantasy setting! From Eisner Award-winning writer Tom Taylor (Nightwing, DCeased) and rising artist Yasmine Putri comes an Elseworlds epic about a hero from a distant world, a dark knight crusader, and an Amazon warrior set in a world of steel and magic.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely wrote All Star Superman outside continuity in 2005, with a single premise: Superman is dying and has twelve labours left. Morrison treats every era of the character as true at once, the Silver Age absurdities, the Golden Age social crusader, the modern icon, and Quitely draws him as physically calm in a way nobody else manages. Issue #10 is widely considered the best single Superman comic ever published. It requires no prior reading at all.

Superman: Birthright The Deluxe Edition collects Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu's twelve-issue retelling of Superman's origin, the version that reframed Clark Kent as a young man travelling the world as a journalist before he ever puts on the suit. Waid's key idea — that Clark can see the living aura around every creature, and therefore cannot bear to let anything die — is the warmest explanation anyone has given for why Superman does what he does.

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? The Deluxe Edition collects Alan Moore and Curt Swan's farewell to the Silver Age Superman — the last story of that continuity before Crisis on Infinite Earths swept it away. Moore called it an imaginary story and then made it the most final one ever told: the villains stop playing, the supporting cast dies, and Superman has to decide what he is willing to do about it.

World's Finest: The Deluxe Edition collects Dave Gibbons and Steve Rude's prestige miniseries, in which Superman and Batman swap cities and discover how badly each one's methods fit the other's problems. Rude draws it in a warm, classical register that makes it feel like the best version of a Silver Age team-up.

Superman: Emperor Joker The Deluxe Edition collects the storyline in which the Joker steals Mister Mxyzptlk's reality-warping power and remakes the universe as a joke at Superman's expense. It is the rare Superman story where the threat is genuinely unanswerable, and it is very funny until it is not.

Superman: Camelot Falls: The Deluxe Edition collects Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco's run, built on an uncomfortable proposition: that by solving humanity's problems Superman is preventing it from growing up, and that his presence will end in catastrophe.

Superman: Up in the Sky: The Deluxe Edition collects Tom King and Andy Kubert's series about a single question: a girl has been taken somewhere across the galaxy, and Superman leaves Earth to find her even though the odds say he should not. Each chapter is a self-contained trial on the way.

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? The Deluxe Edition collects Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber's series, a densely packed comedy in which Jimmy dies, fakes his death, marries a stranger, moves to Gotham and investigates his own murder. It was Eisner-nominated and is unlike anything else DC publishes.

Superman: Kryptonite: The Deluxe Edition collects Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale's story of the first time Superman encountered kryptonite, and of what it means for someone who has never been vulnerable to discover that he can be hurt.

Superman is dying, and instead of fighting it he spends the time left settling his affairs: telling Lois the truth, curing cancer, and answering the one question his father never got to ask. All-Star Superman is the argument that the character works best when he has nothing left to prove.

The Joker steals Mister Mxyzptlk's power, takes control of reality, and spends every day destroying Batman and putting him back together for the next morning. Emperor Joker is the crossover where the Superman books went as far as they could go and then explained why the Joker could never win.

Superboy Prime raises an army of every villain the Legion ever fought, so the Legion answers by fielding three versions of itself from three timelines at once. Johns and Perez drew every Legionnaire who has ever existed onto the same page and somehow kept it readable.

The United States has had its own Superman since 1945, kept in a hangar and used when the official one would say no. Snyder and Jim Lee use him to ask what Superman is for in a country that would rather have a weapon, and Lee draws the biggest pages of his career doing it.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One Deluxe Edition opens the run that followed Dark Nights: Metal, in which the League discovers that the universe runs on two competing forces and that Lex Luthor has picked the other side. Art by Jim Cheung and Jorge Jimenez.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Book Two Deluxe Edition continues the run as the Legion of Doom gains ground and the League has to consider whether the rules of reality can be rewritten in their favour. Jorge Jimenez handles most of the art.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Deluxe Edition Book Three closes the run, bringing the war between Justice and Doom to its conclusion and setting up Dark Nights: Death Metal. It is the payoff to everything Snyder had been building since Metal.

JLA: Earth 2 Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's graphic novel, in which the Justice League crosses into an antimatter universe where their evil counterparts have already won, and discovers that on that Earth good is structurally guaranteed to lose.

America in the 1950s has outlawed its masked heroes, and the ones still working answer to nobody. Darwyn Cooke draws the gap between the Golden Age and the Silver Age as a country deciding whether it still believes in anything, and then lets Hal Jordan, Barry Allen and the Martian Manhunter answer the question.

Ra's al Ghul steals Batman's contingency plans for killing every member of the Justice League and uses them, one by one, exactly as written. Mark Waid turned the team's biggest asset into its worst betrayal, and the fallout defined how the League treated Batman for the next twenty years.

A nail in a tyre stops the Kents driving past the crashed rocket, so Superman never arrives, and the Justice League has to hold a world that turns on them without him. Alan Davis wrote and drew both Nail series, and this is the first time the whole story sits in one book.

Twenty years after the Kansas disaster of Kingdom Come, a survivor takes the power of the gods and starts killing Superman once a day, every day, across time. Waid returns to his own future and uses it to introduce Hypertime, the idea DC spent the next decade arguing about.