Marvel & DC Omnibus

The Phantom Stranger Omnibus collects the 1970s run of DC's least explained character: a man who appears where something is wrong, helps, and leaves without ever saying who he is. Jim Aparo's moody artwork and a rotating cast of writers made it one of the definitive horror-adjacent books of the era.

Young Justice Omnibus Vol. 2 continues Peter David's run through its later, darker stretch, as the team gains members, loses its innocence and heads towards the events that would fold them into the Teen Titans. The comedy stays, but the stakes stop being theoretical.

Power Girl: New Beginnings and Old Friends Omnibus collects the Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Amanda Conner run, which took a character usually treated as a punchline and made her the lead of a genuinely funny superhero comic. Conner's comic timing is the reason it still gets recommended.

The Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the sword-and-sorcery series Grell wrote and drew about a US Air Force pilot who falls through a polar opening into Skartaris, a hollow-earth world of dinosaurs and warring city-states. It was DC's answer to Conan and outlasted most of its imitators.

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.

Adam Strange: Between Two Worlds The Deluxe Edition collects the miniseries that rebuilt DC's pulp science-fiction hero, stranded on Earth after Rann vanishes and desperate to get back to a wife and daughter nobody believes exist.

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.

G. Willow Wilson and Marcio Takara turned a Batman villain into the lead of a body horror road story. Betrayed and dying, Pamela Isley leaves Gotham to spread a fungus that will end humanity, and the book never asks the reader to decide whether she is wrong, only how far she is willing to go.

Dashiell Bad Horse comes back to the Prairie Rose reservation after fifteen years away, working undercover for the FBI against the tribal boss who runs the new casino. Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera wrote the best crime comic of its decade by refusing to let anyone in it be simply guilty or simply innocent.

Bad Horse finally knows who killed his mother, and knowing it does not save anybody. The second omnibus takes Scalped through its last thirty issues, where every character has to pay for the choices made in the first half and Aaron refuses to hand out a single clean ending.

Jesse Custer keeps walking across America looking for a God who abandoned his own creation, and the further he gets the less the joke protects anybody. The second omnibus is where Ennis and Dillon stop playing and the friendships, the Saint of Killers and the Grail all come due at once.

Scott Free escaped Apokolips, escaped Granny Goodness and escaped every trap ever built for him, and then one day he tries to kill himself. King and Gerads use the nine panel grid to tell a story about depression, marriage and a war on New Genesis that may or may not be happening at all.

Christopher Chance makes a living impersonating the people who want to stay alive. He takes a bullet meant for Lex Luthor, gets twelve days to live, and spends them investigating his own murder with the entire Justice League International as suspects. King and Smallwood play it as a 1960s cocktail party with a countdown running.

Kirby left the Fourth World unfinished when DC cancelled it, and for twenty years other people tried to end it for him. This second omnibus collects what came after: the returns, the continuations and the eventual conclusion of the New Gods, from the 1970s through to the writers who inherited Apokolips.

Lono was the worst man in 100 Bullets, and this is the story of him trying to stop. Azzarello and Risso send him to a Mexican mission where he works with the priest and the orphans, and then let the cartel next door find out exactly what kind of animal has been living quietly across the road.

The Anti-Life Equation wakes up and Darkseid has to ask Earth's heroes for help, which tells you how bad it is. Starlin splits the cast into teams across four worlds and then kills a planet to prove the stakes were never rhetorical, in the series that made Mike Mignola's name before Hellboy.

Death of the Endless spends one day every century living as a mortal, so that she understands what she takes. Gaiman gives her two miniseries of her own, and Chris Bachalo draws her as the least frightening thing in any room she walks into.

Fables came back after ending at issue 150, and The Black Forest picks up with the survivors of Fabletown facing what the peace actually cost them. Willingham and Buckingham work together again on the run that closed one of the longest Vertigo series ever published.

Mitchell Hundred can talk to machines, spent a year as a costumed hero, and then got elected Mayor of New York on the strength of it. Brian K. Vaughan writes fifty issues about the superhero problem nobody else touches: what happens when the guy in the cape has to run a city council meeting.

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.

The companion anthology to House of Mystery, hosted by Abel instead of Cain, and the book where Swamp Thing first appeared as a one off horror story. Monsters, witches and revenge tales drawn by the best artists DC had, at the moment the Code stopped being able to stop them.

Gwen Dylan digs graves for a living and eats a brain once a month to keep her memory, which means she inherits the dead person's unfinished business. Roberson and Allred built a monster comedy around it, with a were-terrier, a 1960s ghost and a paintbrush that makes death look like a party.

Palmiotti and Gray moved DC's scarred bounty hunter from the open range into 1880s Gotham City, where he works cases with Amadeus Arkham and finds the city was already rotten a century before Batman. All-Star Western ran the whole New 52 and is the best sustained western DC has published.

The Legion always assumed the 30th century was a utopia. Five Years Later opens with the utopia gone, the team disbanded and the survivors older, poorer and compromised. Giffen and the Bierbaums rebuilt the series as dense political science fiction and split the fanbase permanently.