Absolute Batman: Death of the Family

The animated-continuity Batman comics, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. The Batman Adventures was the comic spun off from Batman: The Animated Series, written for the same audience and, as it turned out, for everyone else too. Mad Love alone justifies the volume: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Harley Quinn origin, which won an Eisner and became the version DC has used ever since. The rest is the animated house style at its best, clean, self-contained stories that work for a child and hold up for an adult, which is rarer than it sounds. The Batman & Robin Adventures followed The Batman Adventures, continuing the animated-series comic after Robin joined the cast and the show's design changed. The Lost Years is the reason collectors chase this: it fills the gap between the original series and The New Batman Adventures, explaining where Dick Grayson went and how Tim Drake arrived. The rest is the same discipline as the first omnibus, short, complete stories with no continuity homework, aimed at any age.

Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27 in 1939 as a pulp vigilante with a gun, and within two years had acquired a sidekick, a code against killing and most of the rogues' gallery still in use today. Everything the character is built on was invented in about eighteen months, and this is that stretch. The Joker and Catwoman both appear in Batman #1, which is one of the strongest single issues in comics history by sheer consequence. The stories are short and strange, and read closer to pulp fiction than to modern superhero comics.

The Batman Adventures was the comic spun off from Batman: The Animated Series, written for the same audience and, as it turned out, for everyone else too. Mad Love alone justifies the volume: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Harley Quinn origin, which won an Eisner and became the version DC has used ever since. The rest is the animated house style at its best, clean, self-contained stories that work for a child and hold up for an adult, which is rarer than it sounds.

Batman: Knightfall Omnibus Vol. 1 begins the Bane saga by turning Gotham into a gauntlet. Arkham's inmates are loose, Batman is forced through fight after fight, and Bane waits for exhaustion to do what brute strength alone cannot: make the Dark Knight break.

No Man's Land is the year DC declared Gotham dead. After the earthquake of Cataclysm, the United States government evacuates the city, dynamites the bridges and leaves whoever stays behind to divide the ruins into territories. The premise strips Batman of everything except the city itself: no infrastructure, no law, and gang leaders marking blocks with spray paint. It is also where Cassandra Cain becomes Batgirl. Volume 1 is the opening third of the crossover, in reading order across every Bat-title, which is the only way it works.

Batman by Paul Dini Omnibus is Batman as detective first and superhero second. Dini brings compact Gotham mysteries where the case matters as much as the costume, and where villains such as Hush, Riddler and Harley Quinn stay personal rather than decorative.

War Games was DC's answer to a simple question: what happens if every gang in Gotham loses its leader on the same night. The answer is a citywide gang war that Batman started by accident. This is the crossover that kills Stephanie Brown, ends Batman's working relationship with the Gotham police and leaves the Bat-family fractured for years. It is also one of the tightest crossovers DC has published: every chapter advances the same night, and the omnibus is the only edition that keeps them in sequence.

Road to No Man's Land is the run-up to DC's biggest Batman event of the nineties. A cataclysmic earthquake levels Gotham, and these are the months in which the city falls apart before Washington writes it off entirely. This is the volume most readers skip and then need: No Man's Land makes far more sense when you have watched Bane escape, Azrael struggle for legitimacy and Gotham's infrastructure fail one system at a time. Chuck Dixon coordinates a dozen titles into a single collapse, and the omnibus finally puts the whole crossover in reading order instead of scattered across four series.

Batman Eternal was DC's attempt at a weekly Batman series: fifty-two issues published in a year, plotted by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV with a rotating writing team. The premise is a slow-motion demolition of Gotham's institutions: Jim Gordon imprisoned for a crash he did not cause, Falcone back in the city, and Batman losing the police force, Arkham and eventually Wayne Enterprises. A weekly schedule forces a plot that never idles, and at fifty-two issues in one volume it reads closer to a season of television than to a comic run.

The Black Mirror was Scott Snyder’s first major DC work, published while Bruce Wayne was absent and Dick Grayson was wearing the cowl. It established Snyder as a Batman writer and led directly to his New 52 run with Greg Capullo. This is Gotham written as horror rather than crime: the threat is a quiet, articulate young man who explains himself calmly, and the tension comes from a father who already knows what his son is. It also makes the strongest case ever published for Dick Grayson as Batman, which is why it stands alone even for readers who skip the surrounding continuity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.