Marvel & DC Omnibus

Spider-Man 2099 Omnibus Vol. 2 collects Peter David's modern return to Miguel O'Hara. Where Vol. 1 was the cyberpunk future, this volume strands the Spider-Man of 2099 in the present day — arriving just as Alchemax, the corporation that will corrupt his future, is being founded, and giving him a chance to change history before it happens. His plan is derailed by the multiversal war of Spider-Verse, and his eventual return home lands him in a 2099 seized by the Maestro. Drawn mainly by Will Sliney, it's a complete, self-contained era of the character now famous from Across the Spider-Verse.

Jason Aaron wrote Thor for seven years, and his opening question was simple: what happens to a god when he stops being worthy of his own hammer. God of Thunder opens with Gorr the God Butcher across three timelines at once — young Thor, present Thor and King Thor — which is the best Thor story anyone has written and the direct source for the fourth film. Jane Foster then takes the hammer while dying of cancer, and Aaron refuses to make that easy.

Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan wrote Deadpool for four years, and their run is the one that made him a mainstream character without softening him. Posehn is a stand-up comedian and it shows in the pacing, but the run's reputation rests on the serious material: the arc where Deadpool discovers he has a daughter, and the issues that treat his healing factor as a curse rather than a joke. It is much sadder than the marketing suggests.

Matt Fraction's Iron Man run is the series that proved the character could sustain genuine literary ambition in the post-MCU era. Launched in 2008 in the wake of the first Iron Man film, Fraction and artist Salvador Larroca delivered 'The Five Nightmares' and the massive 'World's Most Wanted' arc — in which Tony Stark erases his own mind to prevent Norman Osborn from accessing the Superhero Registration database.

Charles Soule is a practising lawyer, and his Daredevil run is the only one that treats Matt Murdock's day job as the interesting part. Soule opens with Matt as a prosecutor rather than a defence attorney, which changes every ethical calculation in the book, and the Mayor Fisk arc turns the Kingpin into an elected official Matt cannot simply beat up. The courtroom material is the most convincing legal writing Marvel has published.

Marvel Team-Up launched in 1972 with a simple format: Spider-Man plus one other Marvel character, every month, no continuity required. The format is the appeal: each issue is a complete story, which makes this the most readable seventies Marvel omnibus for someone dipping in rather than committing. It is also a survey of the whole line at that moment, since the guest star rotates through every book Marvel was publishing.

Dick Grayson, presumed dead after Forever Evil, becomes a secret agent working for Spyral, a shadowy intelligence organisation targeting superheroes. Tom King and Tim Seeley write Grayson with the wit and physical grace that defines the character, while Mikel Janín provides some of the most visually inventive pages in DC publishing of the era. A complete genre switch for a character who had always been a superhero, proving that Dick Grayson works in any narrative One of DC's most creative series of the 2010s.

The fifth Uncanny omnibus is the year the X-Men lose: Claremont's book heading into Mutant Massacre, with the team fractured and X-Factor operating separately. This stretch introduces Longshot and gives Nightcrawler his only solo miniseries of the era, both of which feed straight back into the main title. It is also where Claremont sets up the Marauders and the Morlock tunnels, so the volume works as the last calm before the crossover that ends the classic era.

Old Man Logan is Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's western, set fifty years after the villains won and Logan has spent decades refusing to pop his claws. The original story is a road trip across a America divided between supervillains, and the reason Logan will not fight is the best reveal Millar has written. Jeff Lemire's later run then brings the character into the present day and treats him as a man who has already lost everything and has to watch it happen again.

PRH presents Decimation as the aftermath of House of M, where mutants are nearly no more. The volume is about the shockwave after the event: not only what happened, but how the surviving mutant world reorganizes around loss and fear. This is the bridge from House of M into the next mutant status quo. It is useful for collectors because it gathers the immediate consequences in one place instead of scattering them across multiple X-books.

Mark Waid wrote The Flash for eight years and is the writer who decided Wally West should stop being Barry Allen's replacement and start being better than him. The Return of Barry Allen is here, and it is the best Flash story ever published: Barry comes back, he is wrong, and working out why is the point. Waid also invents the Speed Force in this stretch, which reorganised the entire franchise and is now the basis of the television series.

PRH frames this as Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon's uncensored Punisher MAX run in oversized format. The story drops Frank Castle into a crime war where Kingpin is not just a target, but a force capable of dragging him lower than usual. This is Punisher for readers who want the harsher MAX version rather than a superhero crossover shelf. Aaron and Dillon treat Frank's war as ugly, direct and psychologically punishing, with Kingpin acting as the pressure point for the whole run.

Super Sons pairs Damian Wayne and Jon Kent, Batman's son and Superman's, as a superhero double act built entirely on mutual irritation. Peter Tomasi writes the dynamic as two kids who cannot stand each other and are stuck together, which is funnier and more genuine than the friendship the premise suggests. It is also one of the few DC books that works for a ten-year-old and an adult without condescending to either.

Jeff Lemire's Animal Man is a horror comic about a family: Buddy Baker's daughter turns out to be the avatar of the Red, and something in the Rot wants her. The first issue ends with one of the most genuinely disturbing images DC published that decade, and Travel Foreman's art makes the body horror physical in a way superhero comics normally avoid. Lemire writes Buddy as a father first, which is why the horror lands, the Rot is not after a superhero, it is after his child.

Dark Web is the crossover that finally put Marvel's two most famous clones in the same room: Ben Reilly, now calling himself Chasm, and Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen. Both leads have the same grievance — created as copies, discarded as spares — and the crossover lets them take Manhattan apart over it. It also carries the Gold Goblin series, in which a sane Norman Osborn tries to atone, which is the best thing to come out of the event and reads perfectly well on its own.

Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet is the defining Marvel cosmic event — the story in which Thanos assembles all six Infinity Gems, wipes out half of all life in the universe, and forces Earth's remaining heroes into a desperate, seemingly impossible counterattack.

The Longbow Hunters is the 1987 miniseries that took Green Arrow away from the Justice League, gave him Seattle and made him a grown man with a body count. Grell removed the trick arrows, the superheroics and most of the costume, and wrote a crime series about a middle-aged archer. It is one of the few DC characters permanently changed by a single miniseries, and the run that followed is far darker than the Green Arrow most readers know from television.

Age of Apocalypse is the four-month experiment where Marvel cancelled every X-Men title and replaced it with its alternate-timeline equivalent, with no promise the old world was coming back. The commitment is what made it work: for four months there was no main universe to return to, and readers had to accept a world where Xavier is dead, Magneto leads the X-Men and half the cast is unrecognisable. It also introduced Blink, Dark Beast and X-Man, all of whom outlived the timeline.

Marvel's funniest criminal comedy, collected in its entirety. Boomerang, the Beetle, Speed Demon, Shocker, and the Chameleon: Spider-Man's B-list villains: attempt the most ambitious heist of their careers while spectacularly failing at every step. Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber blend absurdist humour with genuine character work, making you care about people who are objectively terrible at being criminals.

Spider-Man 2099 Omnibus Vol. 1 throws Peter David and Rick Leonardi's future Spider-Man into a neon Marvel dystopia where corporations, identity and violence have replaced the familiar New York street-level rhythm. Miguel O'Hara is not Peter Parker in a new costume; he is a different kind of Spider-Man, born from a harsher future and forced to turn survival into responsibility.

X-Men Legacy: Legion is Simon Spurrier writing David Haller, Charles Xavier's son, as a man whose thousands of personalities each hold a different superpower and none of them obey him. The premise lets Spurrier build a mental landscape as literal architecture, with powers locked in cells and negotiating for release. It is also a book about a son trying to prove he is not his father, published while Xavier was dead. Twenty-four issues, self-contained, and unlike almost anything else with an X on the cover.

The second half of Nick Spencer's Amazing Spider-Man, in which the long game with Norman Osborn and Kindred finally pays off. Sins Rising brings back the Sin-Eater with a genuinely nasty premise, and the Last Remains arc is the best Kindred material in the run. Spencer's ending is divisive, but the volume is where every thread he planted over four years gets pulled, and Sinister War puts most of the rogues' gallery in one place.

Thunderbolts Red is Daniel Way's run on the team, in which General Ross recruits Marvel's most violent characters and runs them as a black-ops unit. The roster is the joke and the point: Red Hulk, Punisher, Deadpool, Elektra and Venom on the same team, all of whom kill and none of whom take orders well. Way writes it as a war comic rather than a superhero book, and the tension comes from Ross being the only one with any interest in restraint.

Brand New Day was Marvel's post-One More Day reset: Peter Parker single again, three issues a month, and a rotating team of writers running the book like a writers' room. Whatever you think of how the status quo was reached, the execution was strong: new villains that stuck (Mister Negative, Anti-Venom, Screwball), a genuine mystery in the Menace subplot, and a Spider-Man written as a broke twenty-something again. Volume 2 is where the new rogues start paying off.