Marvel & DC Deluxe Editions

Nightwing: Year One tells the story DC had left as a gap for twenty years: how Dick Grayson stopped being Robin and became something of his own. Chuck Dixon wrote Nightwing for a decade and this is his retrospective origin: Batman fires Dick, and the story is about a young man discovering that being cut loose is the best thing that could have happened. Scott McDaniel draws movement better than anyone who has handled the character since.

Having established his own Gotham in White Knight, Sean Gordon Murphy widened the story from a municipal argument to a historical one, turning the attack on the Wayne family name itself. The first book asked whether Batman helps Gotham; this one asks what Gotham was built on, which is a harder question and a better sequel. Murphy again handles script and art, so the escalation never loses the visual identity that made the first volume work.

The Man Who Laughs is Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke's account of Batman's first encounter with the Joker, written as a direct continuation of Frank Miller's Year One. Brubaker writes the Joker as a public health emergency rather than a nemesis, poisoned reservoirs, televised threats, a city that does not yet know what it is dealing with, and Mahnke draws the victims' faces, which is the detail everyone remembers. Made of Wood is the other draw: a genuine detective story with the Golden Age Green Lantern.

Under the Red Hood undid the most permanent death in Batman’s history. Judd Winick brought Jason Todd back not as a redemption story but as an indictment, and the arc has shaped every Batman and Robin story written since. Winick refuses to let Batman answer that question comfortably, and the book is stronger for it. At 544 pages this is the complete storyline rather than the abridged version, including Annual #25’s explanation of the resurrection, and it reads as the direct sequel to A Death in the Family.

Batman: Arkham Asylum The Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's painted graphic novel, one of the strangest and best-selling Batman books ever published. On April Fool's Day the inmates take the asylum and demand Batman walk in alone; interleaved with that night is the diary of Amadeus Arkham, the psychologist who built the place after his mother's death. McKean's mixed-media artwork, paint, photography and collage, makes it unlike any other Batman comic.

All-Star Batman by Scott Snyder: The Deluxe Edition collects Snyder's complete post-New 52 run, in which he hands Batman a different A-list artist every arc and sends him out of Gotham. It opens with Batman driving Two-Face across the country while every bounty hunter and civilian in America tries to stop him, and keeps escalating from there. Art by John Romita Jr., Jock, Sean Murphy, Afua Richardson, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Tula Lotay.

Batman: The Cult Deluxe Edition collects Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson's brutal 1988 mini-series, back in print for the first time in over a decade. Batman is captured by Deacon Blackfire, a charismatic preacher building an army in Gotham's sewers, and is starved, drugged and broken until he begins to believe. It is the story of Batman losing, and of what it costs him to come back.

Batman: Sword of Azrael Deluxe Edition collects the origin of Jean-Paul Valley, the assassin conditioned from birth by the Order of St. Dumas and destined to wear the cowl. Written by Dennis O'Neil and drawn by a young Joe Quesada, it is the book that set up Knightfall, and the reason the man who replaced Batman was never going to give the job back quietly.

The Batman Who Laughs: The Deluxe Edition collects Scott Snyder and Jock's New York Times bestselling mini-series, in which the Batman of a dead universe — infected by the Joker's toxin and gifted with the ability to think exactly like him — comes to the main DC Earth with a plan for Bruce Wayne specifically. Includes The Grim Knight, the origin of his equally lethal lieutenant.

Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo: The Deluxe Edition collects Marc Silvestri's series, in which Batman and the Joker are forced to work together after Gordon is kidnapped and Harley Quinn goes missing. Silvestri writes and draws, which he rarely does.

Detective Comics #1000: The Deluxe Edition collects the thousandth issue of the longest-running comic in America, with short stories by most of the writers and artists who have defined Batman over the last forty years.

Mark Waid and Dan Mora took the oldest team-up in superhero comics and made it feel new by refusing to make it grim. Their World's Finest is set in a bright, slightly retro past where Batman and Superman still trust each other, Robin is a boy wonder again and the Doom Patrol, the Devil Nezha and the Metal Men all get their turn.

Tom King and Phil Hester go back to 1961 and tell Gotham's original sin without Batman in it. Private investigator Slam Bradley takes the kidnapping case of Helen Wayne, heir to the Wayne fortune, and what he finds is a city already rotten with police corruption and racial violence long before anyone put on a cape.

A white collar criminal fakes insanity to dodge prison and lands in Arkham Asylum, where the joke stops being funny about four hours in. Dan Slott and Ryan Sook tell Arkham from the inside as a prison drama, with Batman appearing only when the place has already done its work.

Ego is Bruce Wayne sitting in the cave arguing with Batman about whether either of them should exist. Darwyn Cooke drew it in 2000 and it remains the cleanest statement anybody has made about what the character costs the man, collected here with the rest of his Batman and Catwoman work.

After Jason Todd is murdered, Batman starts working alone, angry and out of control, and Alfred calls Nightwing because nobody else will say it to his face. Marv Wolfman uses Dick Grayson's own past to explain what Batman does to the people he takes in, and what the man who killed the Waynes has been doing since.

The Batman Who Laughs has won, the Earth is a scrapyard ruled by dark multiverse versions of everyone, and Wonder Woman has to put a chainsaw through it. Snyder and Capullo close their decade of Batman with the loudest book either of them has drawn, and it is deliberately ridiculous.

Rafael Grampá writes and draws his own Gotham, a city so filthy and so detailed that Batman looks like part of the architecture. It is a Black Label book about a serial killer, and the reason to buy it is that nobody draws like Grampá.

Ten years after Batman was last seen, Gotham has rotted and a fifty-five year old Bruce Wayne puts the suit back on because he cannot help it. Frank Miller's 1986 series is the book that changed what superhero comics were allowed to be, for better and for worse.

New York City: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face the battle of a lifetime, fighting not only the fearsome Foot Clan and their leader, the Shredder, but also the alien forces of General Krang, which is exactly Krang’s plan. Now a single dimensional warp can rid him of both of his greatest rivals in one fell swoop!

Detective Comics: 80 Years of Batman, a deluxe celebration of the series that gave DC its name: the very first Batman story, the debuts of Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman and Bat-Mite, and the first Two-Face, Riddler and Man-Bat stories.

An oracle tells Wonder Woman that the Justice League will die fighting a dragon, so she takes the League out of the fight herself, one member at a time, and goes alone. Christopher Moeller painted the entire book, and it remains the best argument that Diana is the most dangerous person on the team.

Diana has given up the identity, Donna Troy is wearing the costume, and the villains show up to take advantage of a Wonder Woman who is not the real one. Heinberg and the Dodsons wrote the relaunch that had to answer, in public, what the character is actually for.

The Flash: The Rebirth Deluxe Edition Book 1 opens Joshua Williamson's run, in which a Speed Force storm gives half of Central City super-speed and Barry Allen has to work out who to train, who to stop and who is lying to him. Art by Carmine Di Giandomenico.