Crisis on Infinite Earths: Absolute Edition

Who's Who, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. 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.

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.

In 2011 DC cancelled its entire line and restarted fifty two titles from issue one on the same day. Ten years later this anniversary volume collects the first issues that mattered, which is the only honest way to look at a relaunch that produced both Snyder's Batman and a lot of things nobody finished.

In 1988 DC set up a 900 number and let readers vote on whether Jason Todd, the second Robin, would survive. By a margin of 72 votes out of more than ten thousand, they chose to kill him. Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo wrote and drew the outcome, and DC did not reverse it for almost twenty years. Pairing the two arcs is the point: the first shows the cost, the second shows what Batman becomes without it. Read together they explain why Batman spent two decades unable to talk about Jason, and they set up Under the Red Hood directly. This is foundational continuity rather than a curiosity, and the deluxe format is the cleanest way to own it.

House of Mystery: The Bronze Age, collected as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the start of DC's great horror anthology after the Comics Code loosened, hosted by Cain and drawn by a roster including Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams and Alex Toth. Short stories with twist endings, and some of the best art of the era. House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2 collects more of DC's great horror anthology, hosted by Cain and drawn by a roster that reads like a list of the best artists of the era. Short, sharp stories with twist endings, from the period when DC horror was at its peak. The third Bronze Age volume of DC's horror anthology, where Cain introduces short stories that run from genuinely nasty to openly comic. This is the era when the Comics Code loosened and the artists on these books, Wrightson, Aparo, Toth and Kaluta, were allowed to draw what they wanted.

Who's Who, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. 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.

New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 1 follows the beginning of the Wolfman and Pérez Titans era, shaped by Robin, Starfire, Raven, Cyborg, Beast Boy, Wonder Girl and Kid Flash finding a shared emotional engine. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

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 fourth Bronze Age omnibus takes the Justice League into the early eighties, the last years before Crisis on Infinite Earths changed everything. The Leaf Candy mini comic is a genuine curiosity, a promotional giveaway that has never been collected anywhere else. The main run includes the New Gods crossover in #183-185, which is Gerry Conway writing Darkseid at full scale, and the Firestorm and Titans tie-ins that show DC's line starting to interconnect.

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.

After Jason Todd is murdered, Batman starts working alone, angry and out of control, and Alfred calls Nightwing because nobody else will say it to his face. Marv Wolfman uses Dick Grayson's own past to explain what Batman does to the people he takes in, and what the man who killed the Waynes has been doing since.