Marvel & DC Omnibus

Forever Evil is the New 52 event in which the Justice League is removed from play and the Crime Syndicate, their evil counterparts from another Earth, takes over the world. Making Luthor the protagonist is the whole idea, and Geoff Johns commits to it: he is not redeemed, he is simply the only person competent enough to win. The volume also introduces the New 52 version of the Crime Syndicate and gives Batman one of his best scenes of the era, alone against Ultraman.

Greg Rucka writes Frank Castle as a force moving through other people’s lives. Detectives hunt the Exchange, wounded Marine Rachel Cole is pulled into his war, and a grounded crime story keeps widening until Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Avengers can no longer ignore what the Punisher is doing to New York.

Greg Rucka writes Frank Castle as a force moving through other people’s lives. Detectives hunt the Exchange, wounded Marine Rachel Cole is pulled into his war, and a grounded crime story keeps widening until Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Avengers can no longer ignore what the Punisher is doing to New York.

Legendary PUNISHER scribe Garth Ennis reveals the secret, bloody history of Frank Castle and Nick Fury! Before the Punisher was born in Vietnam, Frank Castle had already become a dark legend of the battlefield. Now learn the truth about Castle’s first command — and his first kill. It’s the answer to the question: What made the Punisher?

Legendary PUNISHER scribe Garth Ennis reveals the secret, bloody history of Frank Castle and Nick Fury! Before the Punisher was born in Vietnam, Frank Castle had already become a dark legend of the battlefield. Now learn the truth about Castle's first command - and his first kill. It's the answer to the question: What made the Punisher?

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.

JLA by Mark Waid Omnibus follows Mark Waid's high-concept Justice League stories, shaped by large superhero problems built around intelligence, teamwork and impossible choices. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

Superman/Batman ran for eighty-seven issues on a simple format: the two characters narrating the same events in alternating captions, each convinced the other is doing it wrong. The dual narration is the reason the book works, the reader sees both men misreading each other in real time. This second volume includes the Sons of the Father arc and the Annuals, which are self-contained stories by rotating creative teams and among the most enjoyable single issues DC published that decade.

The second half of James Tynion IV's Batman, written after The Joker War and built around a Gotham where fear itself becomes municipal policy. Fear State is Tynion's best structural work: Scarecrow weaponising civic anxiety while Simon Saint sells Gotham a surveillance state as the cure. It also introduces Ghost-Maker and gives Peacekeeper-01 a genuinely nasty arc. Volume 2 is where the run stops reacting to The Joker and starts arguing about what policing Gotham should look like.

The New Titans is the later era of Wolfman's run, after the team had grown up and the book had to work out what adult Titans looked like. The Batman issues are A Lonely Place of Dying, the crossover in which Tim Drake works out Batman's identity and argues his way into the Robin costume, and this volume gives you the Titans half of it, which the Batman collections leave out. It is the best-integrated crossover DC published that decade.

Having established his own Gotham in White Knight, Sean Gordon Murphy widened the story from a municipal argument to a historical one, turning the attack on the Wayne family name itself. The first book asked whether Batman helps Gotham; this one asks what Gotham was built on, which is a harder question and a better sequel. Murphy again handles script and art, so the escalation never loses the visual identity that made the first volume work.

Justice League International is the 1987 relaunch that rebuilt the League after Crisis on Infinite Earths with the most unlikely roster DC has ever assembled. Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire wrote it as workplace comedy and it works because the threats stay real. Maguire's facial acting is the reason the jokes land at all, and Batman as the exasperated adult in the room is one of the best uses of the character DC has managed.

Hama's fifth Wolverine omnibus covers the peak of his run — the period when the revelations about Logan's true past began to accumulate, the bone-claw Wolverine era began after Magneto stripped his adamantium, and the series navigated the most significant physical change to the character since his creation. Hama made the bone-claw period work by refusing to treat the powerdown as a tragedy, instead using Logan's raw, unenhanced state as an opportunity to demonstrate what made Wolverine dangerous had nothing to do with metal.

The third Bronze Age omnibus covers the late seventies, when Gerry Conway took over the Justice League and gave it the longest continuous run of its classic era. Conway wrote the League for years and used the length: long-running subplots, a rotating roster and the arrival of Zatanna as a permanent member. The JLA/JSA crossovers in this stretch are also the most ambitious of the run, bringing in the Legion of Super-Heroes and the New Gods across multiple Earths.

Jason Aaron's Avengers Forever is the cosmic-scale companion to his main Avengers run — a multiverse-spanning series bringing together Avengers variants from across the Marvel omniverse to battle the Multiversal Masters of Evil, a team of the most dangerous villains from different realities assembled by a version of Doom who conquered his entire universe. Aaron used the multiverse premise to comment on the Avengers concept itself, asking what the team means when its existence replicates across every possible reality.

Iron Man debuted in Tales of Suspense #39 in 1963 as a Cold War arms manufacturer who builds a suit to escape captivity and keep his damaged heart beating. The origin is here in full, along with the first appearances of Pepper Potts, Happy Hogan, the Mandarin, Black Widow and Hawkeye. The grey armour becomes gold and then red-and-gold across these issues, and Tony Stark's heart condition is a genuine limitation rather than backstory — he can die by running out of power.

This is the complete Jeff Parker era, when the Thunderbolts stop being a super-team and become a work-release program. Luke Cage is handed a Raft cellblock of killers — Juggernaut, Crossbones, Ghost and Moonstone, with the swamp-god Man-Thing as their teleporter — and sent out to clean up disasters in exchange for reduced sentences. The run then mutates mid-stream: the squad is stranded in time and rebranded Dark Avengers, closing out both series in a single volume.

The fourth Mighty Thor omnibus covers the early seventies, after Kirby left and Marvel had to work out what Thor was without him. Gerry Conway and John Buscema take over, and the run turns toward long cosmic quests — the search for Odin, the Ego-Prime storyline, Mephisto — while keeping the Asgardian supporting cast intact. Buscema's Thor is more classical than Kirby's, and this stretch is where the character settles into the form he kept for a decade.

Avengers: The Gathering collects the material that Kurt Busiek and George Pérez used to set up their major 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.

Thor debuted in Journey into Mystery #83 in 1962, and the Lee and Kirby run that followed built Asgard as a working mythology inside the Marvel Universe. The Tales of Asgard back-ups are the reason this volume matters: five pages a month in which Kirby drew Norse mythology with no superhero content at all, and they are among the best things he ever did. Everything the films use — the Warriors Three, the Rainbow Bridge, Loki's motivations — is invented here.

Superman: Our Worlds at War Omnibus Vol. 1 throws Superman and the wider DC universe into a conflict big enough to feel like a real planetary crisis. Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and the Superman line use cosmic scale to test Clark's role as protector when the threat is not just a villain, but war itself.

Earth 2: The New 52 Omnibus Vol. 1 follows an alternate DC world after its icons are gone, shaped by legacy, war, replacement heroes and families trying to grow in the wreckage. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

The fourth Avengers omnibus contains the Kree-Skrull War, the storyline that invented the Marvel cosmic event. The Kree-Skrull War runs nine issues with Neal Adams on much of the art, and it is the first time Marvel let a story sprawl across space, involve two alien empires and put the Avengers on trial for it. The Defenders crossover is the other landmark — the first Marvel inter-title crossover, which every event since has copied.

Bruce Banner thinks he finally has total control of his emerald alter ego - but unexpected variables can arise at any time, and there are some things even his brilliant mind cannot imagine. As Bruce hurtles deep into outer space on a dangerous quest, he's about to find out that the Hulk isn't alone!