Marvel & DC Omnibus

The second Claremont omnibus contains the story the X-Men have never escaped: Jean Grey's fall, her death on the moon, and the year that followed. The Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past are both here, which is unusual: two of the most adapted stories in comics, published within two years of each other. Phoenix: The Untold Story reprints the original ending Marvel rejected, with Claremont and Byrne explaining what they had planned, and it is the single most interesting extra in any X-Men omnibus.

Following DC Rebirth in 2016, Tomasi and Gleason write a father Superman: not a loner or a Clark Kent in crisis, but a man who has to teach his son Jonathan Kent what it means to have powers. The most emotionally accessible Superman of the last decade and an answer to anyone who ever wondered how to tell a story about the character that isn't a fight.

After Secret Invasion, Norman Osborn was handed the keys to Marvel's security apparatus. Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts: Dark Reign documents what happened when a mass murderer ran the government's sanctioned superhero team — a study in institutional corruption dressed as a superhero comic. The Thunderbolts under Osborn became Marvel's most morally compromised cast of the era. Collects 1,An oversized volume of Thunderbolts during the Dark Reign period.

New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 4 follows the later Wolfman/Pérez Titans pressure cooker, shaped by cosmic danger, soap-opera pressure, bruised friendships and young heroes carrying consequences. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

Kelly Sue DeConnick's Captain Marvel is the run that changed Carol Danvers from Ms. Marvel into Captain Marvel and built the character the films are based on. DeConnick writes Carol as a test pilot first and a superhero second, and the run's central idea — that she takes the name because a friend earned it and she intends to live up to it — is why the change stuck. The Carol Corps miniseries, set during Secret Wars, is the best thing in the volume.

The second Aaron omnibus completes the run: Jane Foster's tenure ends, Thor gets his hammer back, and the War of the Realms finally arrives after six years of build-up. Aaron plants the War of the Realms in his first year and pays it off in his last, which almost nobody at Marvel gets to do. King Thor is the ending: the last god at the end of the universe, closing the three-timeline structure he opened with. It is one of the few complete, self-contained superhero runs of the era.

Closing of the historic Claremont-Lee collaboration. After editorial differences over creative direction, Claremont left the X-Men after 16 years of uninterrupted writing — the longest continuous run on a superhero title in history. Jim Lee briefly took over the script before leaving to found Image Comics alongside Todd McFarlane and others. A moment of historic transition for Marvel and for American comics that changed the industry forever.

Age of Apocalypse replaced every X-Men title for four months in 1995 with an alternate timeline where Xavier died before founding the school and Apocalypse conquered North America. This is the companion volume: everything published around the original crossover, including the Blink miniseries that turned a background character into the lead of Exiles. If you already own the core Age of Apocalypse, this is the material that fills in how the timeline was built and how it kept coming back.

The Bronze Age is when Batman stopped being camp: after the 1966 television series ended, DC deliberately returned the character to the darkness he started in. This is the era that produced Ra's al Ghul, Man-Bat and the modern Two-Face, and it is the direct ancestor of every serious Batman story since. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams get the credit, but the volume shows the whole line turning at once, the change was editorial policy, not one creative team.

Gerry Duggan wrote the flagship X-Men title through the back half of the Krakoan era, with the team operating as Earth's public superhero squad rather than as a nation's army. Planet-Size X-Men is the issue where the mutants terraform Mars in an afternoon, and the two Hellfire Gala specials are where Krakoa's politics get settled in public. Duggan's run is the most accessible entry to the era: a fixed roster, self-contained arcs, and a clear reason for the team to exist.

The third Ultimate X-Men omnibus takes the series to its end, and the end here is literal: Ultimatum wipes out most of the Ultimate universe's cast in five issues. Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk is the reason to own this: Damon Lindelof's six-issue miniseries, notorious for taking three years to finish and for a first page that shows Wolverine torn in half. Ultimatum then closes the line, and Requiem is the funeral. It is a genuine ending, which superhero comics rarely offer.

Tom Taylor's Titans is the modern era of the team, in which the former sidekicks take over as the DC Universe's primary superhero team after the Justice League disbands. The premise is the payoff of forty years of setup: Nightwing, Starfire, Beast Boy and Raven finally being the adults in charge rather than the next generation. Beast World is the test, a global crisis where the team has to make the calls the League used to make, and does not get them all right.

Mark Millar's Wolverine run is built around two back-to-back storylines — Enemy of the State and Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. — that function as a single complete narrative: Wolverine is captured, brainwashed by HYDRA and the Hand, used as a weapon against every Marvel hero he knows, then deprogrammed and turned loose to hunt down everyone responsible. The premise is engineered for maximum action spectacle and John Romita Jr. delivers one of the defining artistic performances of his career — the two-year run moved faster and hit harder than anything Wolverine-related published in years.

The second Hickman omnibus takes the run to Time Runs Out: eight months into the future, with the Avengers split and the incursions accelerating. This is where the moral question stops being hypothetical: the Illuminati have destroyed worlds, the other Avengers know, and there is no version of the argument where anyone is clean. Hickman also does something rare in superhero comics — he lets the plan fail, and the volume ends with the universe actually running out of time.

Peter David relaunched X-Factor in 2005 as a detective agency staffed by mutants nobody else wanted, working in Mutant Town after House of M cut the population to a few hundred. The Madrox miniseries that opens the volume is a straight noir, and it sets the register: this is a book about people whose powers make ordinary life harder. Layla Miller — 'I'm Layla Miller, I know stuff' — gets her actual explanation here, and David writes Jamie Madrox's duplicates as a genuine identity problem rather than a gimmick.

The second Heroes Return omnibus takes Dan Jurgens' Thor to its end, through the storyline where Thor conquers Earth and rules it. The Reigning arc is the reason to own this: Thor decides humanity would be better governed than protected, takes over, and Marvel lets him hold the position for a year and a half. It is a genuinely uncomfortable run, and the ending — Ragnarok, and Asgard's deliberate destruction — is one of the few permanent endings the character has had.

X-Treme X-Men was the book Chris Claremont was given after Grant Morrison took the main title: a smaller team, travelling the world, hunting the diaries of a mutant who could see the future. Claremont uses the format to write the characters he built and Morrison was not using: Storm leading, Rogue and Gambit together, Bishop and Sage as investigators. Salvador Larroca draws most of it. The Destiny diaries plot seeded here became central to Krakoa twenty years later.

Darkness Reigns. Kneel before the lord of the Symbiotes - The King in Black. Darkness reigns in the Marvel Universe! After a campaign of terror across the galaxy, Knull - ancient and malevolent god of symbiotes - reaches Earth with an endless army of symbiote dragons at his command! The King in Black is a force unlike any ever faced by Venom and the rest of the planet's heroes - but now Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Sub-Mariner and more must battle an endless wave of darkness!

Darkness Reigns. Kneel before the lord of the Symbiotes - The King in Black. Darkness reigns in the Marvel Universe! After a campaign of terror across the galaxy, Knull - ancient and malevolent god of symbiotes - reaches Earth with an endless army of symbiote dragons at his command! The King in Black is a force unlike any ever faced by Venom and the rest of the planet's heroes - but now Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Sub-Mariner and more must battle an endless wave of darkness!

Before Carol Danvers became Captain Marvel, she was Ms. Marvel — and her origin is one of the most significant in Marvel history. Gerry Conway wrote the character's debut series, establishing the framework of a hero who would eventually become one of Marvel's most important figures after decades of evolution. This omnibus collects the foundational Ms. Marvel material including Carol's debut and origin as a superhero, her early adventures establishing her powers, rogues gallery, and supporting cast.

Road to Onslaught covers the year after Age of Apocalypse, when the X-Men return to their own timeline carrying the survivors and the secrets it produced. X-Men Prime is one of the densest single issues Marvel published in the nineties: it restarts every subplot at once and plants the seeds of Onslaught, Operation: Zero Tolerance and Bishop's warnings. Wolverine/Gambit: Victims is the other draw — a Jack the Ripper story in London that is far better than it needed to be.

Danny Ketch's Ghost Rider debuted in 1990 and immediately became one of Marvel's best-selling titles of the decade. The second Ghost Rider is tonally distinct from Johnny Blaze — darker, more violent, and rooted in 1990s urban horror. Howard Mackie's run launched the character, established his mythology, and ran through a period when Ghost Rider was genuinely one of Marvel's hottest properties. Collects Ghost Rider vol. 3 #1–40 (1,) — the opening years of Danny Ketch's adventures.

Brian Michael Bendis relaunched Guardians of the Galaxy in 2013, the year before the first film, and rebuilt the team as Marvel's cosmic front line with Iron Man attached. This is the run that set the modern voice of the team — bickering, disposable planets, Star-Lord's father as a threat rather than a mystery — and it introduced Angela to the Marvel Universe. It also covers Secret Wars, which leaves the Guardians with no galaxy to guard. If you came from the films, this is the run closest to them.

Gwen Stacy became a fan favourite the moment she appeared in Edge of Spider-Verse, and Marvel spent the following years working out what her solo book should actually be. The run splits Gwen between two realities: her own Earth-65, where something is hunting her, and the main Marvel Universe, where she enrols at ESU and the Jackal takes an interest. Including all eleven issues of Web Warriors is what makes this the complete package, since that series is where the wider Spider-Verse cast actually lives.