Marvel & DC Omnibus

Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark relaunched Doom Patrol in 2009, returning the team to superheroics without losing the strangeness the book is known for. Giffen had written the team before and knew the balance: Robotman gets the jokes, Negative Man gets the horror, and Rita Farr gets the dignity. The Metal Men back-up strip that ran with it is also here, and it is some of the most purely fun material DC published that year.

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus collects the original run by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani, in which a group of accident survivors nobody wants are assembled by a man in a wheelchair, months before the X-Men did the same thing. It also ends with the team dying, which nobody did in 1968.

A superhero built out of a bodybuilding advert investigates the end of the world while a rock star overdoses in a phone box and narrates his own childhood. Morrison and Quitely made their first book together an argument that superhero comics are worth defending, and it is still the strangest thing either of them has done.

Aquaman by Peter David Omnibus collects the run that rebuilt the character from scratch in the 1990s: the beard, the harpoon hand, the temper. Peter David took a hero who had become a punchline and turned him into an angry, funny, genuinely dangerous king, and almost every modern take on Aquaman — including the films — starts from what he did here. Over 1,500 pages in a single oversized hardcover.

The Swamp Thing by Ram V & Mike Perkins Omnibus collects the acclaimed run that introduced Levi Kamei, a new Swamp Thing caught between the Green and a body that keeps changing without his consent. Ram V writes ecological horror with a migrant's perspective on belonging, and Mike Perkins draws plant matter as something genuinely alien. Multiple Eisner nominations and one of DC's best-reviewed recent series.

Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones: Deluxe Edition collects the return of the character's co-creator, forty years on, drawn by Kelley Jones in the most gothic register the book has ever had. Len Wein came back to Swamp Thing shortly before his death, and this is that work.

Swamp Thing by Mark Millar and Phil Hester Omnibus collects the final Vertigo run, in which Millar takes the character to the end of his story: Swamp Thing is told he is destined to become the elemental force that ends the world, and spends the run trying to work out whether that is a prophecy or a threat.

Six villains who cannot work with anybody else keep taking jobs together, and Gail Simone spends the second half of the run making you care about every one of them before the bill arrives. The finale is one of the bleakest endings DC has published and it is fully earned.

Harleen collects Stjepan Sejic's painted retelling of how Dr. Harleen Quinzel became Harley Quinn, told entirely from her point of view. She is a serious clinician with a grant, a thesis about empathy and a growing suspicion that Gotham's justice system creates the monsters it punishes. The Joker does not seduce her so much as agree with her, and that is what makes the book frightening.

Batman: White Knight Presents: Harley Quinn and Generation Joker collects two spin-offs from Sean Murphy's White Knight universe: Harley investigating a copycat while raising the Joker's twins, and those twins grown into a story of their own.

Mad Love is the story that turned Harley Quinn from a single episode henchwoman into a permanent fixture of the DC universe. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm tell how Doctor Harleen Quinzel met the Joker inside Arkham Asylum and never left, drawn in the clean animated style that defined a whole generation of Batman comics.

Thirty years of Harley Quinn in one volume, from her first appearance as the Joker's henchwoman in the animated series to the solo antihero who now outsells most of the Bat family. The anniversary collection picks the turning points rather than the best sellers, which makes it the clearest map of how the character changed.

Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo wrote Joker in 2008 as a crime novel: the Joker released from Arkham, reclaiming his territory, seen entirely from the point of view of a low-level henchman. Narrating from a henchman's perspective is what makes it work: the reader is as frightened as he is, and the Joker is never explained. Bermejo paints him without theatricality, scarred, physical, wearing a cheap suit, and the result is closer to Scorsese than to a superhero comic. Batman appears for four pages and it is enough.

Suicide Squad by John Ostrander Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the run that invented everything the concept is known for: Amanda Waller, the bomb in the neck, and the certainty that some of the team will not come back. Ostrander writes it as a Cold War espionage book that happens to use supervillains, and it remains far sharper than any adaptation of it.

Batwoman Omnibus collects the run that gave Kate Kane her definitive form, starting with Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III's Elegy. Williams changes art style with every shift in register, painted when Batwoman is on the page, clean line when Kate is, and it remains one of the most formally ambitious superhero comics ever published.

Amanda Waller keeps sending convicts on missions the government will deny, and in the second omnibus the bill starts arriving: congressional hearings, defections, and a body count among characters readers had come to like. Ostrander wrote the political thriller everyone else has been copying since.

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.

Hitman by Garth Ennis and John McCrea Omnibus Vol. 2 collects the second half of the run, where the jokes stop being free. Tommy Monaghan is a contract killer in Gotham with minor psychic powers and a bar full of friends, and Ennis spends this volume methodically taking them away. It contains 'Of Thee I Sing', widely considered one of the finest Superman stories ever written.

Kirby's longest solo run: forty issues of a boy crossing a post-apocalyptic America ruled by intelligent animals, inventing a new civilisation every few pages. The most sustained showcase of his imagination working without a brake.

Lucifer Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first half of Mike Carey's Sandman spin-off, in which the retired Devil is offered a favour by Heaven and uses it to create a universe of his own, purely to prove he is not part of anyone else's plan. Free will treated as a war, with Peter Gross on art.

Lucifer Omnibus Vol. 2 collects the second half of Mike Carey's run, in which the created universe starts to fail, the war with Heaven becomes unavoidable, and Lucifer has to decide whether independence is worth what it costs everyone around him. It ends on one of the most satisfying final issues Vertigo ever published.

The Invisibles Omnibus collects Grant Morrison's entire countercultural conspiracy epic in one volume: a cell of anarchist agents fighting a secret war against the forces that manufacture consensus reality. Magic, time travel, pop philosophy and 1990s paranoia, running for nearly sixty issues and reportedly a direct influence on The Matrix.

100 Bullets Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first fifty-eight issues of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's Eisner-winning crime series. A man called Agent Graves offers strangers an attaché case containing a gun, a hundred untraceable bullets and irrefutable proof of who ruined their life. What starts as an anthology of revenge turns into something much larger.

Deadman Omnibus collects the run that made Neal Adams's reputation. Boston Brand is a trapeze artist murdered mid-performance, granted the power to possess the living until he finds his killer. Adams's photorealistic figures and broken panel layouts were unlike anything else DC published in 1968.