Marvel & DC Omnibus

Infinite Crisis was DC's 2005 event and the twenty-year sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths, built to fix a universe the company had let get too dark. The four lead-in miniseries are the reason to own it collected: the event only makes sense if you have seen Batman build the OMACs, Wonder Woman kill on camera and Superman refuse to intervene. It is also the moment DC brought back the multiverse it had spent two decades insisting was gone.

Superman appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and invented the superhero. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created him as a champion of the oppressed, and the earliest stories are far angrier than the character's later reputation. The 1938 Superman fights slum landlords, corrupt senators and abusive husbands, he is a social crusader who cannot fly and can be hurt by artillery. Reading the origin of the entire genre is worth it on its own, and the gap between this Superman and the modern one is the most interesting thing in the volume.

This omnibus gathers the twenty-first century Phoenix stories: every attempt Marvel has made to bring Jean Grey back, and the event that used the Force as a weapon against the Avengers. Grant Morrison's Here Comes Tomorrow, Avengers vs. X-Men and Phoenix Resurrection in one volume is a genuinely useful pairing: the first imagines a future without her, the second turns five X-Men into gods, and the third finally brings the original Jean back after fourteen years. It is the complete modern argument about the character.

Benjamin Percy's Wolverine run reached its climactic confrontation in the Sabretooth War — a sustained arc pitting Logan against an army of Sabretooth variants led by the recently empowered original, using the Krakoa resurrection protocols as the engine for the most vicious iteration of the Wolverine/Sabretooth rivalry in decades. Percy built the Sabretooth War across two years of setup, which gave the payoff an accumulated weight that single-arc Wolverine stories rarely achieve.

Injustice began as a tie-in to the fighting game and became one of DC's longest-running alternate universes, built on a single irreversible act: the Joker tricks Superman into killing Lois Lane and their unborn child. Injustice works because it takes its premise seriously: the heroes who side with Superman have reasons, and the ones who oppose him lose. It is the most accessible DC alternate universe on the shelf, with no continuity required, and this omnibus replaces three years of scattered digital-first collections with a single volume.

The complete X-Tinction Agenda crossover in one oversized hardcover. Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson reunite X-Men, X-Factor and New Mutants against Cameron Hodge and the mutant-enslaving state of Genosha, with early Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld art. The turning point that closes the 80s era and sets up the 90s relaunch.

All-New Wolverine is Laura Kinney taking the name after Logan's death, written by Tom Taylor as a story about inherited violence and whether it has to continue. Taylor gives Laura a younger clone, Gabby, and the relationship carries the whole run: someone raised as a weapon deciding what to teach a child who was raised the same way. It is the best material the character has ever had, and it works with no prior X-Men reading at all.

This omnibus gathers Saladin Ahmed's entire Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018) run in one oversized hardcover, from Miles building his own rogues' gallery in Brooklyn to the game-changing arrival of Ultimatum, the ruthless variant who claims to be Miles from another reality. It ties into Absolute Carnage and closes with Miles Morales: The End, giving readers the complete, in-order story behind the character who broke out through Into the Spider-Verse and the Insomniac games.

The conclusion of Matt Fraction's major Iron Man run delivers on every promise made in Volume 1. Tony Stark's mind has been erased. Pepper Potts and War Machine are keeping the world safe while Tony deteriorates to a vegetative state, hunted across the globe by the Mistress of the Dark Dimension. The 'Stark Disassembled' arc and Tony's eventual resurrection and return to form conclude one of the most emotionally and narratively ambitious Iron Man stories ever told. This volume also includes the 'Stark Resilient' arc, which rebuilds Stark Industries from nothing. A complete and important creative statement in a single omnibus.

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.

Daniel Way's Deadpool run launched in 2008 and defined the character for a generation of readers who came to Marvel through the film era — it's the run that pushed the fourth-wall breaking and comedic irreverence to their most extreme expression, making Deadpool one of Marvel's best-selling characters in the process. Way's first volume drops the mercenary into the Secret Invasion event and then into a sustained antagonistic relationship with Norman Osborn's Dark Reign, finding endless comedy in Deadpool's attempts to be taken seriously as a professional assassin.

The first Fantastic Four omnibus collects the genesis of the Marvel Universe — Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creation of the concept that would define American superhero comics for six decades. The Fantastic Four #1 through the early issues introduced not just four characters but the entire conceptual framework of the Marvel approach: fallible heroes with genuine relationships, science fiction adventure grounded in human drama, and a shared universe that was being invented issue by issue. These are the issues that changed everything.

This omnibus collects the pivotal Steve Englehart and Roger Stern era of Doctor Strange, one of the most beloved runs in the character's history. Englehart's mid-1970s work brought genuine philosophical ambition to Strange — incorporating elements of Eastern mysticism, real-world occult traditions, and moral complexity into stories that made the Sorcerer Supreme feel genuinely wise and consequential. Roger Stern followed with sharp, character-driven arcs and legendary collaborations with artists including Marshall Rogers and Frank Miller on covers. This era produced some of the most visually and intellectually ambitious Doctor Strange comics ever published, setting the character's tone for the next two decades.

X-Factor: The Original X-Men Omnibus Vol. 3 closes the original team's X-Factor era, moving through X-Tinction Agenda, Apocalypse, Nathan Christopher and Shadow King pressure before the return to the X-Men fold.

Donny Cates and Nic Klein took over Thor immediately after Jason Aaron, with Thor newly crowned King of Asgard and completely unsuited to the job. The premise is that ruling is harder than fighting, and Cates keeps finding ways to make it worse: the Black Winter, Donald Blake returning as a villain, and Thor's father problems becoming policy problems. Klein's art is the other reason — his Asgard looks like a real place with weather.

The final third of Morrison's Batman is Batman Incorporated: Bruce Wayne going public as the franchise's financier and recruiting a Batman for every country. The idea, that Batman's real superpower is money and organisation, is the most modern thing anyone has done with the character. It also ends with Damian's death, which Morrison had been building toward since the first volume and which DC did not undo for years. This is the payoff of the whole seven-year argument.

The second Snyder and Capullo omnibus takes their run to its end, through Endgame and Superheavy, and asks what Gotham does when Batman is genuinely gone. Endgame is the best Joker story of the modern era: no theatricality, no motive, just a threat that treats Batman as a natural phenomenon to be studied. Superheavy then puts Jim Gordon in a mech suit as a city-sanctioned Batman, which is a far better idea than it sounds. It closes the run properly rather than handing off mid-arc.

Red Hood and the Outlaws: The New 52 Omnibus Vol. 1 follows Jason Todd, Arsenal and Starfire as a damaged trio trying to become more than a collection of loose cannons. The run is messy by design: Jason's trauma, Roy's loyalty and Starfire's outsider perspective give the team a combustible identity inside the New 52. Its shelf value is the Jason Todd angle, but the book works best as an anti-hero team piece rather than a solo Red Hood volume.

The Darkseid War is the conclusion of Geoff Johns' years-long Justice League story, in which Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor go to war and Earth is the battlefield. The central idea is the best thing in Johns' run: each member is elevated to a New God, Batman takes the Mobius Chair and learns everything, Superman becomes a darker version of himself, the Flash is bonded to the Black Racer. Batman using omniscience to answer who killed his parents is the scene everyone remembers.

The final New Mutants omnibus covers the run's last years and the transition into X-Force, when Rob Liefeld and Cable arrived and the book changed genre entirely. This is the volume that contains Inferno and Cable's first appearance in #87's run-up, the moment the team stops being students and becomes a paramilitary unit. Louise Simonson writes the losses hard, and the shift from Claremont's classroom to Liefeld's battlefield happens inside these pages rather than between volumes.

The Avengers launched in 1963 with a team assembled almost by accident: Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man and the Wasp against Loki. This omnibus is the beginning of everything. These thirty issues contain the Hulk quitting, Captain America found frozen in the Atlantic, the first appearance of Kang the Conqueror, and Cap's Kooky Quartet — the moment Marvel replaced its entire roster with three reformed villains and made it work. Whatever the Avengers have become since, the shape of the team was decided here.

Final Crisis is Grant Morrison's 2008 event, in which Darkseid wins on page one and the rest of the story is about what happens to a universe after evil has already taken it. Morrison writes it as a deconstruction of superhero comics themselves: the Anti-Life Equation spreads as a meme, reality degrades into fragments, and the narrative structure breaks down with it. It is DC's most formally difficult event and its most rewarding on a reread, and Batman R.I.P. runs directly into it.

Loki began as Thor's antagonist in Journey into Mystery and spent five decades becoming one of Marvel's most reinterpreted characters. This first omnibus gathers his earliest appearances. Avengers #1 is here, which matters because Loki is the reason the team exists — he manipulates the heroes into assembling and they stay together. The volume traces him from a straightforward trickster villain to the schemer whose plans are the real plot, which is the version everything since has used.

Batman: Black and White is DC's long-running anthology of short Batman stories told without colour, used as an open invitation to creators who would never draw a monthly. The format forces economy: eight pages, no colour, one idea. What you get is a survey of how sixty different artists see the same character, and it doubles as the best single-volume argument for black-and-white printing in superhero comics. There is no reading order and no continuity to catch up on.