Dark Nights: Death Metal Omnibus

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 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.

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: 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.

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.

Scott Snyder relaunched Swamp Thing for the New 52 alongside his Batman run, turning Alec Holland into the reluctant avatar of a green kingdom at war with rot. Rotworld is the crossover with Jeff Lemire's Animal Man, and reading the two together is the point — the Animal Man chapters are included here for exactly that reason. Yanick Paquette's page layouts, with borders that grow like plants, are among the most beautiful in DC's modern output.

Batman and Robin Eternal was the second weekly Bat-series, published while Bruce Wayne had no memory of being Batman and Dick Grayson was working as a spy. The hook is that Bruce is unavailable, so the entire Bat-family has to solve it without him and without being able to ask what he knew. It also introduces Cassandra Cain to the post-Flashpoint continuity, arriving in Gotham as a silent young woman looking for Batman, which is the best version of that entrance anyone has written.

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.