Batman: Year Three: The Deluxe Edition

Patrick Gleason wrote and drew Robin: Son of Batman after years drawing Damian Wayne in Batman and Robin, giving him a solo book about atonement. The premise is the Year of Blood: Damian retracing the atrocities the League of Assassins made him commit as a child and undoing each one. Gleason knows the character better than anyone, and having him on script and art gives the book a coherence solo Robin series rarely achieve.

The Man Who Laughs is Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke's account of Batman's first encounter with the Joker, written as a direct continuation of Frank Miller's Year One. Brubaker writes the Joker as a public health emergency rather than a nemesis — poisoned reservoirs, televised threats, a city that does not yet know what it is dealing with — and Mahnke draws the victims' faces, which is the detail everyone remembers. Made of Wood is the other draw: a genuine detective story with the Golden Age Green Lantern.

Batman and Spawn crossed over twice in 1994, once from each publisher, with Frank Miller and Doug Moench writing and Todd McFarlane and Klaus Janson drawing. The 1994 books are a document of the moment Image was outselling DC and the two companies had to negotiate as equals. The 2022 one-shot is the reason to buy it now: McFarlane and Capullo, the two definitive Spawn and Batman artists, on the same book for the first time.

The Killing Joke was published in 1988 as a one-shot in which the Joker sets out to prove that one bad day is all it takes to break anyone. Bolland finishes his own art and the control is the point: the Joker is terrifying because the drawing never flinches. The recolouring is genuinely different from the 1988 version — flatter, colder, with the flashbacks in near-monochrome — and it is the reason this edition exists. It remains the most cited Joker story ever published.

Before The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale produced three Halloween specials for Legends of the Dark Knight between 1993 and 1995. They are where the pair worked out the seasonal structure and noir framing that would define their later work together. Haunted Knight is short, and that is its strength: three complete stories that show Loeb and Sale finding their voice in real time. Read before The Long Halloween it supplies context; read after it works as a set of character studies about fear and obligation. For collectors of the Loeb/Sale run, it is the missing first volume.

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.

Sean Gordon Murphy pitched a Batman story set outside continuity and was given something rare: full control of script and art, and a Gotham of his own that DC has since expanded into a whole line. White Knight is the strongest recent entry point for a reader with no Batman background: no crossovers, no prior reading, one authorial voice on script and art. It also commits to its argument instead of walking it back in the last chapter, which is rare for a Batman story that questions Batman.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale followed their Halloween specials with a thirteen-issue murder mystery set during Batman’s early years, when Gotham still belonged to the Falcone family and the costumed criminals were only beginning to appear. It was conceived as a direct sequel to Frank Miller’s Year One and became the template for a generation of Batman crime stories. The Long Halloween is one of the few Batman stories that works equally as detective fiction and as tragedy: the mystery holds up, but the real subject is a good man being destroyed in slow motion. Tim Sale’s silhouettes and Gregory Wright’s seasonal colour make each chapter feel like a different month. It is the book Christopher Nolan drew on most heavily for The Dark Knight, and it remains the standard recommendation for a reader’s second Batman purchase after Year One.

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.

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.

Deathstroke: The Terminator by Marv Wolfman Omnibus Vol. 2 continues the run by the character's co-creator, in which Slade Wilson gets his own series and turns out to work better as a lead than anyone expected of a Teen Titans villain.

The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract Deluxe Edition collects the storyline in which Terra, a Titan the team trusted completely, is revealed to have been working for Deathstroke the whole time. It is the most famous betrayal in DC history.

The magazine half of Marvel's Dracula project, printed in black and white and written for an adult audience without the constraints of the Comics Code. Longer stories, harder edges, and a different Dracula from the one in the colour series.

The middle and strongest stretch of Marvel's longest-running horror series. Dracula is hunted across Europe while the book turns from monster-of-the-month into a genuine serial novel with a continuing cast. Gene Colan's shadow work here is the reason artists still study this run.

Deathstroke: The Terminator is Slade Wilson before the modern antihero polish, moving through contracts, family damage and the hard-edged DC action of the early 1990s. Marv Wolfman and Steve Erwin make him dangerous because he is not just skilled; he is controlled, compromised and always carrying the cost of his own choices.

The New Titans is the later era of Wolfman's run, after the team had grown up and the book had to work out what adult Titans looked like. The Batman issues are A Lonely Place of Dying, the crossover in which Tim Drake works out Batman's identity and argues his way into the Robin costume — and this volume gives you the Titans half of it, which the Batman collections leave out. It is the best-integrated crossover DC published that decade.