Marvel & DC Omnibus

The third Sandman omnibus gathers everything Neil Gaiman wrote around the main series: the prequel, the spin-offs and the two stories about Death. Overture is the prequel Gaiman wrote twenty years later with J.H. Williams III, explaining the exhaustion that led to Morpheus' capture in issue #1, and it is some of the most beautiful art ever printed in a superhero-adjacent comic. The Death stories are also the most accessible entry point to the whole mythology.

Joe Kelly turns Deadpool from a loud mercenary into a damaged man who desperately wants proof that he can be better. Blind Al, Weasel and Siryn give him people to fail; Taskmaster, Typhoid Mary and T-Ray make sure every attempt at redemption hurts. The jokes land because the consequences do not disappear.

Joe Kelly turns Deadpool from a loud mercenary into a damaged man who desperately wants proof that he can be better. Blind Al, Weasel and Siryn give him people to fail; Taskmaster, Typhoid Mary and T-Ray make sure every attempt at redemption hurts. The jokes land because the consequences do not disappear.

Superstar creator Rob Liefeld returns to Deadpool for his biggest epic yet! Wade Wilson has been shooting, stabbing and otherwise annoying people for a long time. He's made a lot of enemies. But one he can't quite place is the brutal Thumper, who keeps showing up out of the blue to pound him into jelly!

The second Wolverine omnibus covers the late eighties solo series, when Logan was running a bar in Madripoor under the name Patch and pretending nobody recognised him. The Madripoor era is the character at his most enjoyable: a crime story where everyone knows who Patch is and nobody says it. Meltdown, drawn by Jon J. Muth and Kent Williams in full painted art, is one of the most visually ambitious things Marvel published that decade and is otherwise almost impossible to find.

Rick Remender's Captain America — one of the most creatively ambitious runs of the Marvel NOW! era, collected in a single omnibus. Remender stranded Steve Rogers in the dimension of Dimension Z for years of subjective time, aging him, breaking him, and rebuilding him in ways no previous writer had attempted.

Mark Waid's third Flash omnibus keeps Wally West moving through the part of the run where legacy becomes pressure, not just inspiration. The speed is still there, but the real pull is emotional: Wally balancing love, responsibility, fear and the impossible standard of being the Flash. It is a continuation for readers who want the DC hero behind the lightning, not just the lightning itself.

Dark Crisis is DC's 2022 event, opening with the Justice League dead and the DC Universe left to the heroes who were never good enough to join. The Worlds Without a Justice League specials are the best part: each dead hero trapped in a personal paradise they have to recognise as false. It is also the event that restored the multiverse DC had spent a decade compressing, and Nightwing carrying the League is the arc that made him a lead again.

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 major reimagining.

Bill Mantlo and Bob Layton defined Iron Man for the late 1970s in a run that pushed Tony Stark toward harder moral questions while delivering consistently entertaining superhero fiction. Mantlo's plotting was ambitious and Layton's pencils — clean, kinetic, and ideally suited to mechanical detail — gave the armored Avenger a visual signature that persisted for years afterward. This omnibus collects a transitional era that laid critical groundwork for the Michelinie-Layton 'Demon in a Bottle' era that followed. For collectors building a complete Iron Man archive, this volume fills an important gap in the character's development.

Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme launched in 1988 and gave the character his longest-running solo title, ninety issues across a decade. Peter Gillis and Roy Thomas rebuild the magical side of the Marvel Universe from scratch here, with Strange having lost most of his power and having to earn it back. It is the run that established the modern rules of Marvel magic — the Vishanti, the balance of realms — that every later writer has worked within.

Grant Morrison's Animal Man is the 1988 run that made Buddy Baker famous and ends with the character meeting his own writer. The final issue, in which Buddy sits down with Morrison and asks why his family was killed, is one of the most discussed comics ever published. The run is also genuinely angry about animal cruelty, which almost no superhero book has attempted before or since.

The third Fantastic Four omnibus continues Lee and Kirby at full stride, in the years when the book was introducing a new permanent concept almost every month. The density is the point: the Kree and Annihilus both become the basis for decades of Marvel cosmic storytelling, and Adam Warlock's debut here leads directly to the Infinity Gauntlet twenty years later. Franklin Richards' birth is also the first time a superhero team acquired a baby and kept it.

The third Claremont Wolverine omnibus covers the series' transition period as the Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants events reshaped the X-Men landscape, requiring Wolverine's solo book to operate in direct response to seismic changes in the main X-Men line. Claremont used this period to deepen Logan's physical and psychological wounds from the Mutant Massacre, explore his complex feelings about the Xavier Institute's direction under Magneto, and introduce new supporting characters that would define the solo series through the Hama era that followed.

Captain America Comics #1 was published in March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, with Cap punching Hitler on the cover — a political statement at a time when America was still officially neutral. Simon and Kirby received death threats for the first issue and the mayor of New York personally assured them of police protection. Beyond the history, these are the twelve issues that invented the character, Bucky, the Red Skull and the shield — and Kirby's pages are already unmistakably his at twenty-three years old.

DC New 52 Villains Omnibus gathers one of DC's most unusual publishing events: Villains Month 2013, when every ongoing series was replaced by a one-shot starring a villain. Orbiting the Forever Evil storyline, in which the Crime Syndicate conquers the DC Universe, each issue delivers a secret, origin or fate for a major antagonist, from the Joker and Darkseid down through the whole line. An anthology by Geoff Johns, Gail Simone, Charles Soule, Jeff Lemire and many more, with art including Jim Lee. A complete, one-book record of the event.

The fifth New Teen Titans omnibus takes Wolfman's run into its later years, when the team had fractured and the survivors were rebuilding. This stretch contains the Titans Hunt build-up and the reintroduction of Danny Chase, and it is where Wolfman starts writing the team as adults with jobs rather than teenagers. Eduardo Barreto's art is the underrated element, cleaner and more grounded than Pérez, and better suited to where the stories had gone.

Planetary is Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's twenty-seven issue series about a team of archaeologists investigating the secret history of the twentieth century. Every issue takes a genre, pulp heroes, kaiju films, Hong Kong ghost stories, superhero comics themselves, and treats it as a real historical event that was covered up. Cassaday redraws his entire style each time to match. It is one of the few comics that is genuinely about comics without being cynical, and it has an ending.

The Sandman Omnibus Vol. 1 collects the first half of Neil Gaiman's landmark series, the story of Dream of the Endless, ruler of the realm of sleep, from his captivity and escape through the rebuilding of his kingdom. It is horror, myth, history and literary fantasy in one voice, and it made comics respectable as literature: issue #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," became the first comic ever to win a World Fantasy Award. Painted covers by Dave McKean, art by Sam Kieth, Kelley Jones, P. Craig Russell and more. The foundational Vertigo masterpiece in a single oversized volume.

The second volume of Iron Man's Silver Age adventures continues the work begun by Stan Lee and expands it under Archie Goodwin, one of the most underrated writers in Marvel history. Goodwin brought narrative sophistication and emotional consistency to the title, deepening Tony Stark's characterization beyond the playboy industrialist archetype. This omnibus covers a rich transitional period for the character, with iconic armor upgrades, new villain introductions, and the early development of the themes — technology, identity, addiction — that would define Iron Man for decades. A key volume for collectors building a complete Iron Man library.

The third Peter David omnibus covers the mid-nineties, when the merged Hulk started coming apart and the book pushed further into science fiction. Future Imperfect is the reason to own this volume: David and George Pérez on a future where the Hulk has become the Maestro, a warlord ruling the ruins of civilisation. It is one of the best-regarded Hulk stories ever published and the direct source of the Maestro that Marvel keeps returning to.

The second Byrne Fantastic Four omnibus covers the conclusion of his major run, including Sue Storm's evolution from Invisible Girl to Invisible Woman, the extended Secret Wars connection, the Thing's return from self-imposed exile, and a major Doctor Doom conflict that reinforces Doom as one of the team's defining enemies.

The second volume of Golden Age Captain America collecting more of the original Joe Simon and Jack Kirby run: the stories that cemented Cap as a wartime cultural icon. This omnibus continues directly from Volume 1, featuring Bucky Barnes at his most active, increasingly inventive villains, and Kirby's artwork growing ever more dynamic and confident.

Wakanda: World of Black Panther gathers the series Marvel published around Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther, expanding the country into a setting with its own cast. World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay is the first Marvel title written by a Black woman, and the Dora Milaje material is the best thing in the volume. Shuri by Nnedi Okorafor is the other draw — a science-fiction book about a young engineer, and the closest Marvel has come to Afrofuturism as a genre rather than a setting.