Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

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.

The Anti-Life Equation wakes up and Darkseid has to ask Earth's heroes for help, which tells you how bad it is. Starlin splits the cast into teams across four worlds and then kills a planet to prove the stakes were never rhetorical, in the series that made Mike Mignola's name before Hellboy.

Death of the Endless spends one day every century living as a mortal, so that she understands what she takes. Gaiman gives her two miniseries of her own, and Chris Bachalo draws her as the least frightening thing in any room she walks into.

Fables came back after ending at issue 150, and The Black Forest picks up with the survivors of Fabletown facing what the peace actually cost them. Willingham and Buckingham work together again on the run that closed one of the longest Vertigo series ever published.

Darkseid's curse comes due, the Legion loses members permanently and Levitz spends five hundred pages showing what a superhero team looks like when the losses stick. The Curse is the run that followed The Great Darkness Saga and is the better half of the two.

Someone is stealing the most powerful beings in the universe and nobody can work out who. The Great Darkness Saga keeps its villain hidden for most of its length, and when the answer arrives it is the single best use anyone has made of Darkseid outside Kirby's own comics.

A Green Lantern is taken hostage by a group DC calls terrorists and their side of the story turns out to be the one that holds up. King wrote The Omega Men straight out of the CIA and it shows: the book is about occupation, propaganda and what the word terrorist is doing in that sentence.

It is 2048 and a teenager who went viral serving corn dogs has just been elected President of the United States. Mark Russell wrote the funniest political satire DC has published, and then it stopped being funny when most of the jokes turned out to be predictions.

The final volume of Alan Moore's fantasy epic puts Promethea on trial in the Immateria and then ends the world, calmly and on purpose. Moore and J.H. Williams III spend the last issues turning the comics page itself into the subject, and the result is unlike anything else in the medium.

Easy Company fights its way across Europe and nobody comes home a hero. Joe Kubert drew Sgt. Rock for thirty years and the stories he wrote himself are the hardest of them, war comics that refuse the adventure and keep asking what the men are actually for.

A student writing an essay about a forgotten fictional character discovers she has become that character, and that the place she comes from is made entirely of imagination. Alan Moore uses Promethea to teach the reader magic on purpose, and J.H. Williams III rebuilds the page layout for every single issue.

The middle volume is where Promethea stops being a superhero comic and becomes a guided walk up the Tree of Life, one sephirah per issue, with Sophie and Barbara talking their way through creation. It is the most formally ambitious stretch Moore has written for a monthly comic.