Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

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.

Justice: The Deluxe Edition by Jim Krueger, Alex Ross and Doug Braithwaite: the Justice League's villains unite to save the world, as a cover for enslaving it. All 12 issues plus over 100 pages of character biographies, sketches and extras.

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow The Deluxe Edition collects Tom King and Bilquis Evely's eight-issue western in space, told by a teenage girl named Ruthye who hires Supergirl to help her hunt her father's killer across the galaxy. Kara is not the narrator, and seeing her through someone else's eyes is exactly what makes the book work. Evely and colourist Mat Lopes produced some of the most beautiful pages DC has published this decade.

A girl hires Supergirl to help her hunt the man who killed her father, and the journey across eight worlds turns into an argument about whether revenge is worth what it takes. King and Evely wrote the Supergirl story the film was built on, and it is a western more than a superhero comic.

The first murder in five hundred years, twenty billion suspects and one rookie Green Lantern a long way from home. N. K. Jemisin brings her science fiction to the City Enduring, a place that solved violence by chemically removing everyone's emotions, and asks what happens the day that stops working.

The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract Deluxe Edition collects the storyline in which Terra, a Titan the team trusted completely, is revealed to have been working for Deathstroke the whole time. It is the most famous betrayal in DC history.

The Sandman: Overture Deluxe Edition collects the prequel Neil Gaiman wrote twenty-five years after the original series, explaining what left Morpheus weakened enough to be captured in Sandman #1. J.H. Williams III draws it, and the pages are among the most elaborate ever printed in a mainstream comic.

The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition Book Three collects the middle stretch of Neil Gaiman's series, including Brief Lives, in which Dream and his sister Delirium go looking for their missing brother and the consequences reshape the rest of the story.

The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition Book Four collects the run into The Kindly Ones, the longest and darkest arc of the series, in which everything Dream has done across seventy issues comes back for payment. Marc Hempel's stylised artwork divided readers and is now regarded as the right choice.

The Sandman: The Deluxe Edition Book Five closes the series with The Wake and the final stories, in which the Dreaming buries its king and the people whose lives he touched get their last word. It is one of the few long-form comics that ends exactly as well as it began.

The Nice House on the Lake: The Deluxe Edition collects James Tynion IV and Álvaro Martínez Bueno's horror series, in which ten friends are invited to a lakeside house by a man they have all known for years, and the world ends while they are inside. It won an Eisner and is one of DC Black Label's best-received books.

The story that made Vertigo. An occult order tries to capture Death and catches her brother instead, and when Dream of the Endless finally escapes after seventy years he has to rebuild a kingdom that fell apart without him. Book One is where Gaiman goes from writing a horror comic to writing the thing everyone else has been copying since.