Marvel & DC omnibus editions

Amanda Waller keeps sending convicts on missions the government will deny, and in the second omnibus the bill starts arriving: congressional hearings, defections, and a body count among characters readers had come to like. Ostrander wrote the political thriller everyone else has been copying since.

Hitman by Garth Ennis and John McCrea Omnibus Vol. 2 collects the second half of the run, where the jokes stop being free. Tommy Monaghan is a contract killer in Gotham with minor psychic powers and a bar full of friends, and Ennis spends this volume methodically taking them away. It contains 'Of Thee I Sing', widely considered one of the finest Superman stories ever written.

This second omnibus completes Mike Grell's Warlord in one volume, gathering the back half of his defining run on the sword-and-sorcery series in original colors, with a new introduction by Grell and an afterword by Dan Jurgens. Travis Morgan fights to hold Skartaris together as Grell shares scripting with Sharon Wright and hands art duties to Mark Texeira and a young Dan Jurgens. Warlord stands as one of DC's foundational fantasy titles, and this edition closes the definitive collection of Grell's original work.

Kirby's longest solo run: forty issues of a boy crossing a post-apocalyptic America ruled by intelligent animals, inventing a new civilisation every few pages. The most sustained showcase of his imagination working without a brake.

Lucifer Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first half of Mike Carey's Sandman spin-off, in which the retired Devil is offered a favour by Heaven and uses it to create a universe of his own, purely to prove he is not part of anyone else's plan. Free will treated as a war, with Peter Gross on art.

Lucifer Omnibus Vol. 2 collects the second half of Mike Carey's run, in which the created universe starts to fail, the war with Heaven becomes unavoidable, and Lucifer has to decide whether independence is worth what it costs everyone around him. It ends on one of the most satisfying final issues Vertigo ever published.

The Invisibles Omnibus collects Grant Morrison's entire countercultural conspiracy epic in one volume: a cell of anarchist agents fighting a secret war against the forces that manufacture consensus reality. Magic, time travel, pop philosophy and 1990s paranoia, running for nearly sixty issues and reportedly a direct influence on The Matrix.

100 Bullets Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first fifty-eight issues of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's Eisner-winning crime series. A man called Agent Graves offers strangers an attaché case containing a gun, a hundred untraceable bullets and irrefutable proof of who ruined their life. What starts as an anthology of revenge turns into something much larger.

Deadman Omnibus collects the run that made Neal Adams's reputation. Boston Brand is a trapeze artist murdered mid-performance, granted the power to possess the living until he finds his killer. Adams's photorealistic figures and broken panel layouts were unlike anything else DC published in 1968.

The Phantom Stranger Omnibus collects the 1970s run of DC's least explained character: a man who appears where something is wrong, helps, and leaves without ever saying who he is. Jim Aparo's moody artwork and a rotating cast of writers made it one of the definitive horror-adjacent books of the era.

Young Justice Omnibus Vol. 2 continues Peter David's run through its later, darker stretch, as the team gains members, loses its innocence and heads towards the events that would fold them into the Teen Titans. The comedy stays, but the stakes stop being theoretical.

Power Girl: New Beginnings and Old Friends Omnibus collects the Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Amanda Conner run, which took a character usually treated as a punchline and made her the lead of a genuinely funny superhero comic. Conner's comic timing is the reason it still gets recommended.

The Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the sword-and-sorcery series Grell wrote and drew about a US Air Force pilot who falls through a polar opening into Skartaris, a hollow-earth world of dinosaurs and warring city-states. It was DC's answer to Conan and outlasted most of its imitators.

House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2 collects more of DC's great horror anthology, hosted by Cain and drawn by a roster that reads like a list of the best artists of the era. Short, sharp stories with twist endings, from the period when DC horror was at its peak.

House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the start of DC's great horror anthology after the Comics Code loosened, hosted by Cain and drawn by a roster including Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams and Alex Toth. Short stories with twist endings, and some of the best art of the era.

Dashiell Bad Horse comes back to the Prairie Rose reservation after fifteen years away, working undercover for the FBI against the tribal boss who runs the new casino. Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera wrote the best crime comic of its decade by refusing to let anyone in it be simply guilty or simply innocent.

Bad Horse finally knows who killed his mother, and knowing it does not save anybody. The second omnibus takes Scalped through its last thirty issues, where every character has to pay for the choices made in the first half and Aaron refuses to hand out a single clean ending.

Jesse Custer keeps walking across America looking for a God who abandoned his own creation, and the further he gets the less the joke protects anybody. The second omnibus is where Ennis and Dillon stop playing and the friendships, the Saint of Killers and the Grail all come due at once.

Kirby left the Fourth World unfinished when DC cancelled it, and for twenty years other people tried to end it for him. This second omnibus collects what came after: the returns, the continuations and the eventual conclusion of the New Gods, from the 1970s through to the writers who inherited Apokolips.

Mitchell Hundred can talk to machines, spent a year as a costumed hero, and then got elected Mayor of New York on the strength of it. Brian K. Vaughan writes fifty issues about the superhero problem nobody else touches: what happens when the guy in the cape has to run a city council meeting.

The third Bronze Age volume of DC's horror anthology, where Cain introduces short stories that run from genuinely nasty to openly comic. This is the era when the Comics Code loosened and the artists on these books, Wrightson, Aparo, Toth and Kaluta, were allowed to draw what they wanted.

The companion anthology to House of Mystery, hosted by Abel instead of Cain, and the book where Swamp Thing first appeared as a one off horror story. Monsters, witches and revenge tales drawn by the best artists DC had, at the moment the Code stopped being able to stop them.

Gwen Dylan digs graves for a living and eats a brain once a month to keep her memory, which means she inherits the dead person's unfinished business. Roberson and Allred built a monster comedy around it, with a were-terrier, a 1960s ghost and a paintbrush that makes death look like a party.

Palmiotti and Gray moved DC's scarred bounty hunter from the open range into 1880s Gotham City, where he works cases with Amadeus Arkham and finds the city was already rotten a century before Batman. All-Star Western ran the whole New 52 and is the best sustained western DC has published.