Elseworlds: Superman Omnibus Vol. 1-2

PRH presents this as Grant Morrison's bold New 52 reimagining of Superman. The run starts from a more raw, early-career Man of Steel and builds toward stranger, larger threats without losing the idea of Superman as a social and moral force. This is the compact shelf for Morrison's New 52 Superman: part origin energy, part cosmic experiment, part statement about what Superman means when the myth is rebuilt from the street upward.

In 1992 DC killed Superman and the story made the evening news. Thirty years later this edition collects it as a single book. Doomsday is the rare villain who works precisely because he has no personality, no motive, no dialogue, just forward motion, and the escalating panel counts across the final issues are one of the smartest formal tricks in mainstream comics. Whatever you think of the stunt, it is the best-selling comic story ever published.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely wrote All Star Superman outside continuity in 2005, with a single premise: Superman is dying and has twelve labours left. Morrison treats every era of the character as true at once, the Silver Age absurdities, the Golden Age social crusader, the modern icon, and Quitely draws him as physically calm in a way nobody else manages. Issue #10 is widely considered the best single Superman comic ever published. It requires no prior reading at all.

The Death and Return of Superman is not just the day Superman falls; it is the whole shockwave after the fall. Doomsday turns the fight into a public wound, Metropolis has to imagine a world without Clark Kent, and four new figures step into the empty space where Superman used to stand. This omnibus keeps the event, grief and rebirth together as one huge DC turning point.

New Krypton is the storyline in which a hundred thousand surviving Kryptonians arrive on Earth and Superman stops being the last of his kind. The premise is the best Superman question anyone has asked recently: what does he do when his people arrive and they are not like him. The Kryptonians are militaristic, entitled and legally separate, and Superman has to choose between them and Earth. It ran across every Superman title for two years and only reads properly collected.

Phillip Kennedy Johnson's Superman sends Clark Kent to Warworld, powerless, to free a population that has never heard of him. The Warworld Saga is the best-reviewed Superman run in years and its premise is unusually hard: a Superman with no powers, no sun and no way home, who has to organise rather than punch. Superman and the Authority by Grant Morrison is here too, which is where the volume's setup comes from.

Elseworlds: Superman Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the alternate-reality Superman stories: what if the rocket had landed somewhere else, in another century, in another country. Includes Speeding Bullets, Kal and the other classics of the line.

Superman: Our Worlds at War Omnibus Vol. 1 throws Superman and the wider DC universe into a conflict big enough to feel like a real planetary crisis. Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and the Superman line use cosmic scale to test Clark's role as protector when the threat is not just a villain, but war itself.

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.

Elseworlds: Superman Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the alternate-reality Superman stories: what if the rocket had landed somewhere else, in another century, in another country. Includes Speeding Bullets, Kal and the other classics of the line.

Elseworlds: Justice League Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the out-of-continuity stories that put the Justice League in other worlds and other centuries: Victorian London, the Wild West, medieval fantasy. No continuity, no consequences, just premises followed to their conclusion.

Detective Comics #1000: The Deluxe Edition collects the thousandth issue of the longest-running comic in America, with short stories by most of the writers and artists who have defined Batman over the last forty years.

The Joker: 80 Years of the Clown Prince of Crime collects eight decades of the character in one volume, from his first appearance in 1940 through the Silver Age camp, the Bronze Age return to menace and the modern era. An anthology rather than a run.

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.

Elseworlds: Superman Omnibus Vol. 2 continues the alternate-reality Superman collection with more of the line's out-of-continuity stories, from historical settings to outright fantasy. Take the last son of Krypton, land the rocket somewhere else, and follow the logic wherever it goes, no continuity, no consequences.

Batman: Detective Comics: The New 52, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Batman: Detective Comics: The New 52 Omnibus Vol. 1 starts the New 52 Detective Comics era with a sharper, more violent Gotham and a Batman pushed through crime, spectacle and body-horror shocks. Tony Daniel and James Tynion IV make the book feel immediate, glossy and aggressive in a way that matches the relaunch mood. The second Detective Comics New 52 omnibus covers Gotham's most unstable stretch of the era, with the city cycling through hallucination, corruption and a replacement Batman. Gothtopia is the standout: a Gotham where everyone is happy and Batman is the only one who notices something is wrong. Layman's run is far better regarded now than it was on release, and having the Gordon material here connects Detective to the end of Snyder's Batman run.