Absolute Dark Nights: Death Metal

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 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.

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.