Dale Eaglesham

Avengers by Jonathan Hickman Omnibus Vol. 2 is the collapse half of Hickman's Marvel architecture. Infinity, the Illuminati and Time Runs Out turn the Avengers from Earth's greatest team into people making impossible choices while parallel universes die around them. The book matters because it is the direct road to Secret Wars: cosmic scale, moral compromise and long-form science-fiction plotting inside the Marvel Universe.

Gotham is destroyed by an earthquake, the federal government abandons it and declares an emergency zone. Whoever stays inside remains outside the law. The city becomes ungoverned territory where gangs, escaped Arkham villains and Batman fight it out street by street. Best political story of the Dark Knight. Introduces Cassandra Cain as the new Batgirl.

Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run established his Marvel career's defining mode — massive, architecturally complex narratives with years-long payoffs, introduced through the Council of Reeds (alternate universe versions of Reed Richards who had solved every problem and abandoned their families) and the War of Four Cities that pitted the Kree, the Inhumans, the High Evolutionary's creations, and the Kree's counter-faction against each other simultaneously. This is Hickman operating at maximum ambition before the Avengers work that followed.

Batman: No Man's Land Omnibus Vol. 2 closes the ruined-Gotham saga after months of gang borders, collapsed institutions and Bat-family survival. Lex Luthor enters with reconstruction money, the Joker delivers one of the era's cruelest final blows and Batman has to decide what saving Gotham means after the city has already been abandoned.