Justice League

The second New 52 Justice League omnibus covers the back half of Geoff Johns' run, when the team's internal politics became the plot. Trinity War is the crossover where three Justice League teams fight each other over a murder none of them committed, and it is the best structured event DC published in the New 52. Johns also finally writes the Superman and Wonder Woman relationship as a decision with consequences rather than a marketing beat.

Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV wrote Justice League as cosmology: the Source Wall breaks and the forces that built the universe start taking sides. The premise is that the Justice League have been fighting the wrong war: the Legion of Doom is trying to unmake reality's rules rather than rob a bank. The Batman Who Laughs is included here for good reason, it is the best thing to come out of the era and it reads as the run's real antagonist.

Injustice: Gods Among Us, collected complete as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Injustice 2 keeps asking what happens after a world has already been broken by its heroes. Tom Taylor returns to a DC universe where trust is scarce, power has consequences and every alliance carries the memory of Superman’s regime. The result is not just a fighting-game tie-in; it is a sharp alternate-DC political thriller about rebuilding after tyranny. Injustice: Gods Among Us Omnibus Volume 1 collects the opening three-year block of the Injustice saga in one huge hardcover, giving DC readers a brutal alternate-universe shelf built around Superman's fall, Batman's resistance and a world under authoritarian pressure.

Justice League by Snyder & Tynion, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV wrote Justice League as cosmology: the Source Wall breaks and the forces that built the universe start taking sides. The premise is that the Justice League have been fighting the wrong war: the Legion of Doom is trying to unmake reality's rules rather than rob a bank. The Batman Who Laughs is included here for good reason, it is the best thing to come out of the era and it reads as the run's real antagonist. The second Snyder and Tynion omnibus takes the Justice League run to its conclusion, through the Year of the Villain and the rise of the Batman Who Laughs. The Batman Who Laughs stops being a crossover villain here and becomes the character DC built a whole line around: a Bruce Wayne infected by the Joker who is smarter than either. Hell Arisen is where he wins, briefly and completely, and it leads directly into Dark Nights: Death Metal.

Grant Morrison relaunched the Justice League in 1997 with the original seven members and a simple thesis: they are gods, and the stories should be that size. Morrison writes each arc as an escalation that should be impossible to top and then tops it: angels, an invading White Martian fleet, and a villain who has already won by page one. Earth 2 with Quitely is the standout, a world where evil always wins, and the League cannot fix it. It is the template for every League run since.

JLA by Mark Waid Omnibus follows Mark Waid's high-concept Justice League stories, shaped by large superhero problems built around intelligence, teamwork and impossible choices. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

The second Snyder and Tynion omnibus takes the Justice League run to its conclusion, through the Year of the Villain and the rise of the Batman Who Laughs. The Batman Who Laughs stops being a crossover villain here and becomes the character DC built a whole line around: a Bruce Wayne infected by the Joker who is smarter than either. Hell Arisen is where he wins, briefly and completely, and it leads directly into Dark Nights: Death Metal.

Absolute Power Omnibus collects Mark Waid and Dan Mora's event and its tie-ins, in which Amanda Waller finally does what she has been building towards for years: strips every metahuman on Earth of their powers at once and leaves the heroes to fight back with nothing. Collected complete in a single oversized hardcover.

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.

Elseworlds: Justice League Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the out-of-continuity stories that put the Justice League in other worlds and other centuries: Victorian London, the Wild West, medieval fantasy. No continuity, no consequences, just premises followed to their conclusion.

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 League: The New 52 / Geoff Johns, collected complete as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Justice League: The New 52 Omnibus Vol. 1 launches DC's 2011 League from first contact and public suspicion. Geoff Johns and Jim Lee rebuild Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and Cyborg into a team under world-ending pressure. Justice League: The New 52 Omnibus Vol. 2 continues Geoff Johns' League through larger DC event machinery, including Forever Evil and Darkseid War. The team faces the Crime Syndicate, Lex Luthor's rise and the cosmic pressure of the New Gods.

Justice League relaunched in 2011 as the flagship of DC's New 52, with Geoff Johns and Jim Lee starting the entire universe from scratch. The first arc is the League's origin retold for a generation that had only seen the films, and the Darkseid invasion gives them a reason to stay together. Johns then spends years on the Trinity War and the Crime Syndicate, and this volume is the run in full rather than the opening six issues everyone owns.

The Darkseid War is the conclusion of Geoff Johns' years-long Justice League story, in which Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor go to war and Earth is the battlefield. The central idea is the best thing in Johns' run: each member is elevated to a New God, Batman takes the Mobius Chair and learns everything, Superman becomes a darker version of himself, the Flash is bonded to the Black Racer. Batman using omniscience to answer who killed his parents is the scene everyone remembers.

The second Bronze Age Justice League omnibus covers the early 1970s, when the team left their secret New England cave for a satellite in orbit and the stories went cosmic. This is where the JLA/JSA team-ups settle into their yearly rhythm and the multiverse becomes a working part of DC's storytelling rather than an occasional gimmick. It is also the era that established the League as DC's legends rather than just its biggest team.

Justice League: The Detroit Era Omnibus follows one of the League's strangest reinventions, shaped by a roster away from the usual icons, street-level tension and a rougher identity search. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

DC One Million Omnibus collects Grant Morrison's crossover in which the Justice League of the 853rd century invites the present-day heroes to the future, and every DC title that month jumped a million issues ahead. It is Morrison at their most gleefully inventive: a Superman living inside the sun, a Batman descended from Bruce Wayne's line, and Vandal Savage still alive and still furious.

Identity Crisis 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition collects Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales' murder mystery, in which the wife of a second-string Justice Leaguer is killed and the investigation exposes something the League did years ago and agreed never to discuss. It is the book that made DC's heroes capable of real moral failure, and it remains one of the most argued-about comics of the century.

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.