Marvel & DC omnibus editions

Dark Nights: Metal Omnibus collects Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's event and every tie-in, in which Batman's obsessive investigating tears open the Dark Multiverse and lets seven nightmare versions of himself into reality. It is the story that gave DC the Batman Who Laughs, and it is deliberately the loudest, most excessive thing Snyder and Capullo ever made together.

Batman teams up with a different DC hero every issue and Bob Haney writes each one as if continuity were a rumour he had heard once. The result is the loosest, fastest Batman comic ever published, and Jim Aparo draws almost all of it.

Batman by Paul Dini Omnibus, his Batman comics collected in one volume for the first time: Detective Comics #821-852, Batman: Streets of Gotham, Catwoman's revenge on Hush and Detective Comics #1000, by the co-creator of Harley Quinn.

Scott Snyder relaunched Swamp Thing for the New 52 alongside his Batman run, turning Alec Holland into the reluctant avatar of a green kingdom at war with rot. Rotworld is the crossover with Jeff Lemire's Animal Man, and reading the two together is the point, the Animal Man chapters are included here for exactly that reason. Yanick Paquette's page layouts, with borders that grow like plants, are among the most beautiful in DC's modern output.

Hal Jordan first wore a Green Lantern ring in 1959, in a reinvention that turned a 1940s crime-fighter with a magic lantern into science fiction with an interstellar police force behind it. This is where the mythology gets built piece by piece: Sinestro, Star Sapphire, the Guardians of the Universe and the idea that the ring runs on willpower. Gil Kane's figure work is the other reason to read it, he drew flight better than anyone in the era, and the designs have barely changed since.

Wonder Woman: Rebirth by Greg Rucka Omnibus collects Rucka's return to the character, built around a problem no other writer had dared name: after years of reboots, Diana's own memories no longer agree with each other. The run alternates between a present-day investigation and a retold origin, with art by Liam Sharp and Nicola Scott, and turns continuity chaos into the actual subject of the story.

Wonder Woman by John Byrne Omnibus collects the run in which Byrne wrote and drew Diana himself, introduced Cassie Sandsmark as Wonder Girl, and killed Diana off to make her a goddess on Olympus. It is the most eventful stretch of 1990s Wonder Woman and the source of characters still in use today.

The original Wonder Woman, written by the psychologist who invented the lie detector and drew on his own theories about submission, dominance and a better world run by women. Marston and Harry G. Peter's comics are far stranger than their reputation and this is where they start.

The sixth and final Golden Age volume covers the handover: Marston is dead, Robert Kanigher takes the book over, and Harry G. Peter keeps drawing it until the end of the era. It is the last stretch of the original Wonder Woman before the Silver Age reinvented her.

The third Silver Age volume runs the series into the late 1960s, where the impossible romances and the Wonder Family finally give way to the changes that would strip Diana of her powers entirely. Kanigher keeps writing it at full speed until the very end.

Joshua Williamson wrote The Flash for six years, the longest run since Mark Waid, and this volume covers its conclusion. Issue #750 is the anniversary special that brings back every Flash at once, and the finale pays off the Forces cosmology Williamson spent years building, Speed, Strength, Sage and Still. Barry Allen's relationship with Wally West is the emotional spine, and the ending gives both of them somewhere to go.

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.

The Sandman ran for seventy-five issues between 1989 and 1996 and is the book that proved comics could be sold to people who did not read comics. This half contains Brief Lives, Worlds' End and The Kindly Ones, which is where the whole series turns out to have been a tragedy with a fixed ending all along. The Wake closes it. Gaiman planned the finish from early on and refused to continue past it, which is why the series holds together as a novel rather than a run.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti moved Harley Quinn to Coney Island and gave her a building, a gang of misfits and a life entirely separate from Batman. Separating Harley from the Joker is what made the character work as a lead, and this run is where DC committed to it. Conner's art carries the comedy, and the supporting cast of tenants and sideshow performers gives her something to protect that is entirely her own.

Dark Nights: Death Metal Omnibus collects the sequel to Metal and every tie-in: the Batman Who Laughs has won, Perpetua rules a broken multiverse, and Wonder Woman leads what is left of the resistance. Snyder and Capullo use it to settle DC's entire continuity problem at once, and it ends with the multiverse rebuilt as the Infinite Frontier.

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus collects the 1996 crossover in which the two universes fought, plus the Amalgam books — a full month of comics from a merged reality where Batman and Wolverine are one character called Dark Claw, and Superman and Captain America are Super-Soldier. A genuine one-off in comics history, collected complete.

Insomnia puts every hero on Earth to sleep at once and traps them inside their own worst nightmare. Knight Terrors is the rare crossover where the tie-ins are the point: each one takes a character apart using the thing they will not look at, and this omnibus collects the whole event in reading order.

Ditko created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and then spent decades at DC building characters nobody asked him for: the Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, Hawk and Dove, Stalker. This omnibus collects all of it, and it is the strangest looking superhero work of its era.

Everything Kirby made at DC in the 1970s that was not the Fourth World, in one volume: Kamandi, OMAC, the Demon, Sandman, Kobra and the war stories. He was writing, drawing and editing all of it at once, at an age when most creators are repeating themselves.

Darkseid cannot beat Earth's heroes, so he sets out to make the public stop believing in them instead. Legends is the first event DC ran after Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the fallout created the Suicide Squad, the Justice League International and the Flash everyone knows today.

Every character DC owned, one per page, drawn by the artist most associated with them. Who's Who was published monthly in the 1980s as a loose leaf encyclopedia and it is still the best single record of what the DC universe contained before Crisis rearranged it.

The second half of DC's illustrated directory, running through the rest of the alphabet and into the post Crisis updates. Same format, same idea: one character per page, drawn by whoever owned them, from the biggest names in the line to characters nobody has used since.

The Joker’s Bronze Age stories capture the character after camp has curdled back into danger. The smile is still theatrical, but the menace grows sharper, with creators like Dennis O’Neil, Martin Pasko, Irv Novick, Jim Aparo and José Luis García-López shaping a Joker who can be absurd, stylish and genuinely frightening in the same breath.

Green Arrow: The Golden Age Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the character's earliest adventures from the 1940s, when Oliver Queen and Speedy were a straightforward Batman-and-Robin analogue with an arrow car and an arrow plane, and none of the politics that came later.