Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

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.

Dream goes to Hell to free a woman he condemned there, and comes back to find that Lucifer has handed him the key to the whole place. Book Two contains Season of Mists and A Game of You, the point at which the series stops being about horror and starts being about responsibility and the cost of never changing your mind.

A superhero built out of a bodybuilding advert investigates the end of the world while a rock star overdoses in a phone box and narrates his own childhood. Morrison and Quitely made their first book together an argument that superhero comics are worth defending, and it is still the strangest thing either of them has done.

Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones: Deluxe Edition collects the return of the character's co-creator, forty years on, drawn by Kelley Jones in the most gothic register the book has ever had. Len Wein came back to Swamp Thing shortly before his death, and this is that work.

Batman: White Knight Presents: Harley Quinn and Generation Joker collects two spin-offs from Sean Murphy's White Knight universe: Harley investigating a copycat while raising the Joker's twins, and those twins grown into a story of their own.

Mad Love is the story that turned Harley Quinn from a single episode henchwoman into a permanent fixture of the DC universe. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm tell how Doctor Harleen Quinzel met the Joker inside Arkham Asylum and never left, drawn in the clean animated style that defined a whole generation of Batman comics.

Thirty years of Harley Quinn in one volume, from her first appearance as the Joker's henchwoman in the animated series to the solo antihero who now outsells most of the Bat family. The anniversary collection picks the turning points rather than the best sellers, which makes it the clearest map of how the character changed.

Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo wrote Joker in 2008 as a crime novel: the Joker released from Arkham, reclaiming his territory, seen entirely from the point of view of a low-level henchman. Narrating from a henchman's perspective is what makes it work: the reader is as frightened as he is, and the Joker is never explained. Bermejo paints him without theatricality, scarred, physical, wearing a cheap suit, and the result is closer to Scorsese than to a superhero comic. Batman appears for four pages and it is enough.

The Joker: 80 Years of the Clown Prince of Crime collects eight decades of the character in one volume, from his first appearance in 1940 through the Silver Age camp, the Bronze Age return to menace and the modern era. An anthology rather than a run.

Adam Strange: Between Two Worlds The Deluxe Edition collects the miniseries that rebuilt DC's pulp science-fiction hero, stranded on Earth after Rann vanishes and desperate to get back to a wife and daughter nobody believes exist.

G. Willow Wilson and Marcio Takara turned a Batman villain into the lead of a body horror road story. Betrayed and dying, Pamela Isley leaves Gotham to spread a fungus that will end humanity, and the book never asks the reader to decide whether she is wrong, only how far she is willing to go.

Scott Free escaped Apokolips, escaped Granny Goodness and escaped every trap ever built for him, and then one day he tries to kill himself. King and Gerads use the nine panel grid to tell a story about depression, marriage and a war on New Genesis that may or may not be happening at all.

Christopher Chance makes a living impersonating the people who want to stay alive. He takes a bullet meant for Lex Luthor, gets twelve days to live, and spends them investigating his own murder with the entire Justice League International as suspects. King and Smallwood play it as a 1960s cocktail party with a countdown running.

Lono was the worst man in 100 Bullets, and this is the story of him trying to stop. Azzarello and Risso send him to a Mexican mission where he works with the priest and the orphans, and then let the cartel next door find out exactly what kind of animal has been living quietly across the road.