Marvel & DC Omnibus

The fifth Fantastic Four omnibus continues Roy Thomas's run through the transition to Len Wein and other writers, covering the period when Marvel was experimenting with the team's format — including the Thing's solo focus, the shifting relationship dynamics post-Medusa's team membership, and the introduction of new antagonists that would define later FF eras. This volume documents the book's creative search for a post-Kirby identity before Byrne's eventual definitive reimagining.

The third Fantastic Four omnibus covers the final period of the Lee/Kirby collaboration — the run toward Kirby's departure to DC, featuring the introduction of the Him/Warlock concept, Crystal's full integration into the team after Sue Storm's pregnancy, and the complete Kree/Skrull setup that Thomas would develop in Avengers. These late Kirby issues show a creator pushing against the creative constraints of the Marvel system before leaving for DC and the New Gods concept that would be his ultimate artistic statement.

The second Fantastic Four omnibus enters the period when Kirby and Lee were at their most inventively prolific — these issues introduced the Black Panther, the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, and Galactus within a concentrated run that has no equivalent in mainstream comics history. The invention rate was unprecedented: concepts that became the foundations of entire franchise lines were being introduced monthly, with Kirby's cosmic imagination operating at a frequency that exhausted every collaborator who tried to keep pace.

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.

No Surrender was Marvel's 2018 weekly Avengers event — a 16-part storyline published weekly across four months with rotating creative teams coordinating to tell a single continuous story. The Grandmaster and the Challenger wager on an Avengers-related game using Earth as the board and the Avengers as unwitting pieces, with the team simultaneously dealing with an escalating global crisis while their members fall one by one. No Road Home followed as a direct sequel, a nine-issue weekly series sending the Avengers into a mythological realm to recover a cosmic object stolen from Nyx, goddess of night.

Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers launched immediately after Avengers vs. X-Men as the flagship title of Marvel NOW! — a Unity Squad of Avengers and X-Men working together to fulfill Charles Xavier's dream of human/mutant coexistence, led by Captain America and Havok. Remender used the format to address the damage Cyclops's actions had done to the mutant cause, positioned Havok as a controversial spokesperson for a post-AvX mutant identity, and built toward the Apocalypse Twins storyline — a massive alternate future/time-travel epic where the villains literally won.

The second Busiek/Pérez Avengers omnibus contains the arc most frequently cited as the definitive Avengers story: Ultron Unlimited, the four-issue siege of an Eastern European nation where Ultron kills every living being and constructs an army from their remains. Busiek spent the preceding issues building Ultron's return to maximum dread, and when the assault arrives, Pérez's artwork of the Avengers standing against an enemy that has already won is among the most powerful in the character's history.

Kurt Busiek and George Pérez's Avengers run is the definitive modern-era Avengers series — a deeply character-focused, mythology-respectful, beautifully drawn restoration of the team's greatness following the disastrous Crossing and Heroes Reborn period. Their opening Morgan le Fay storyline reset the team's direction with immediate clarity, and Busiek spent the next four years demonstrating that the Avengers format at its best was about character ensembles, earned emotional moments, and threats that were genuinely worthy of the assembled heroes.

Jonathan Hickman's Avengers Vol. 1 launches his massive, interlocking Avengers/New Avengers run — one of the most ambitious sustained narratives in Marvel history, building across four years toward Secret Wars. This first volume establishes the Avengers as a planetary defense system responding to universal-scale incursion threats, while simultaneously in New Avengers the Illuminati discover that parallel Earths are colliding and destroying each other, a phenomenon called incursions that will eventually consume the entire multiverse.

Geoff Johns's Avengers run with Olivier Coipel — the Kang Dynasty storyline — is one of the most underrated Avengers arcs of the modern era, a time-travel epic where Kang the Conqueror declares war on Earth from the year 3000 and the Avengers must fight a war spanning multiple time periods simultaneously. Johns used the time-travel framework to bring multiple versions of the Avengers into conflict with each other, and Coipel's detailed, expressive artwork gave the scale of the Kang invasion genuine visual weight.

Avengers: The Crossing is one of Marvel's most ambitious and divisive mid-90s storylines — a complex conspiracy narrative revealing that Iron Man had been a secret agent of Kang the Conqueror for years, manipulating events from inside the team. The storyline required the teenage alternate-universe version of Tony Stark to replace the compromised adult, a desperate editorial solution to the dead-end the Crossing's plot had created. Bob Harras coordinated a crossover that remains historically fascinating for how thoroughly it was reversed in subsequent years.

Avengers: The Gathering collects the material that Kurt Busiek and George Pérez used to set up their landmark Avengers run — the prelude issues, the Thunderbolts crossover material, and the gathering of heroes following the extended period when the main Avengers were missing after the Onslaught event. Busiek's preparatory work established the emotional and narrative foundation for one of the best-received Avengers creative runs in the team's history.

The sixth Avengers omnibus covers the conclusion of Englehart's run, centered on the Celestial Madonna storyline — one of the most ambitious Bronze Age Marvel narratives, weaving Mantis's mysterious origin through past, present, and future while simultaneously resolving the Swordsman's arc with his death in combat. Englehart used the Vision and the Scarlet Witch's relationship as the emotional spine of the era, building toward their eventual marriage in a standalone special that remains one of Marvel's most unusual romantic narratives.

Steve Englehart's Avengers run is the most politically sophisticated in the team's history — he used the book as a direct commentary on the Watergate era, with the Secret Empire storyline revealing a vast government conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of power, a conclusion so resonant with contemporary events that Marvel editorial forced Englehart to leave the outcome implicit. The Avengers-Defenders War gave way to something more psychologically complex: Englehart's Avengers were a team operating in a country whose institutions were actively corrupt.

The fourth Avengers omnibus continues Roy Thomas's era into the period of the legendary Avengers-Defenders War — the first major inter-title crossover in Marvel history, where the two teams were manipulated into fighting each other by Loki and Dormammu across eight issues spanning both books. The crossover established the template for Marvel's event publishing model and proved that interconnected storytelling across separate titles could work as a commercial and narrative strategy.

The third Avengers omnibus covers Roy Thomas's tenure including the landmark Kree-Skrull War — the first major Marvel cosmic event, a war between two galactic empires that drew the Avengers into space opera territory years before the concept became Marvel's standard mode. Neal Adams and John Buscema provided the artwork for this era's most ambitious stories, and Thomas demonstrated that the Avengers format could sustain multi-issue epic storytelling without losing character focus.

The second Avengers omnibus continues the Silver Age run through the period when the team fully established its identity distinct from its founding members — the Cap's Kooky Quartet era, where Captain America led a team of reformed villains (Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver) while the original Avengers stepped back. Stan Lee and then Roy Thomas built a book that proved the team concept could work without relying on its most popular members, a structural experiment that defined how Marvel managed ensemble casts going forward.

The first Avengers omnibus collects the founding of Marvel's premier super-team from their debut in 1963 — Stan Lee and Jack Kirby establishing the team concept, the first roster shuffles, and the foundational mythology that made the Avengers the umbrella concept for Marvel's entire publishing line. These early issues include the first appearances of classic Avengers antagonists, the Hulk's departure from the team, and the introduction of Captain America as the team's moral center.

Old Man Logan is Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's definitive post-apocalyptic Wolverine story — set fifty years in a future where the villains won, the heroes are dead, and an elderly Logan who has refused to unsheathe his claws since the night he was tricked into killing the X-Men lives as a broken man on a continent carved up between Hulk Gang territory and Red Skull's new America. The story uses the western genre's elegiac mode — the reluctant gunfighter dragged back into violence one last time — to tell the most emotionally resonant Wolverine story since the original Miller miniseries.

Death of Wolverine is Charles Soule and Steve McNiven's four-issue event series killing Logan after the loss of his healing factor — a premise that forced the question of what Wolverine actually is without the regeneration that made him unique.

Return of Wolverine is Charles Soule's five-issue miniseries bringing Logan back from the death established in Soule's own Death of Wolverine — completing the narrative circle of a writer who stewarded the character through both his end and his revival.

Tom Taylor's All-New Wolverine is one of the best Marvel solo series of the 2010s regardless of character — the story of Laura Kinney stepping out of Logan's shadow to wear the Wolverine costume and prove she's more than a weapon or a clone, told with emotional intelligence and consistent craft across 35 issues. Taylor brought genuine warmth to a character whose origin was defined by trauma, made the Clone Saga subplot (Laura's younger clone Gabby) into one of the most beloved supporting character introductions in recent Marvel history, and delivered a run that works on its own terms without requiring knowledge of Wolverine's wider mythology.

X-23 is the most fully realized Wolverine spin-off character ever created — Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost conceived her as a female clone of Wolverine weaponized from birth, used as an assassin by the Weapon X program offshoot known as the Facility, and their work establishing her origin in the animated series was adapted into the comics in one of the medium's most harrowing backstory sequences. The first omnibus covers her origin and early missions, establishing the psychological damage that Tom Taylor would later translate into Marvel's best all-ages superhero series.

Daken: Dark Wolverine collects Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu's work on Logan's son — a character who possesses all of Wolverine's physical gifts and none of his moral constraints, making Daken simultaneously the most dangerous and the most psychologically interesting Wolverine spin-off character. Way introduced Daken as an antagonist in his Wolverine run before Liu took the character into genuinely unexpected psychological territory, exploring what a lifetime of weaponized trauma produces in someone with Wolverine's DNA but none of his father's redemptive arc.