Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

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.