Marvel & DC Omnibus

Everyone who ever knew Batman comes to his funeral and each of them tells a different, contradictory story about how he died. Gaiman and Kubert wrote the eulogy DC asked for after Batman R.I.P., and turned it into a story about why this particular character never stays dead.

The complete Death Metal event in one volume: the main series, every tie-in and the specials, in the direct market exclusive variant edition. Snyder and Capullo close out their decade of Batman with the Batman Who Laughs ruling a scrapyard Earth and Wonder Woman coming to take it back with a chainsaw.

Batman teams up with a different DC hero every issue and Bob Haney writes each one as if continuity were a rumour he had heard once. The result is the loosest, fastest Batman comic ever published, and Jim Aparo draws almost all of it.

Ten years after Batman was last seen, Gotham has rotted and a fifty-five year old Bruce Wayne puts the suit back on because he cannot help it. Frank Miller's 1986 series is the book that changed what superhero comics were allowed to be, for better and for worse.

Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo took over Fantastic Four in 2002 and wrote it as what it always claimed to be: a family of explorers rather than superheroes. Unthinkable is the run's peak and the best Doctor Doom story in decades: Doom wins completely, and what he does with the victory is genuinely disturbing. Waid also writes the most convincing Reed Richards anyone has managed — a man whose intelligence is a character flaw. Wieringo's art keeps the whole thing warm.

Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Fantastic Four run applied the same widescreen action cinema approach the pair had pioneered in The Ultimates to Marvel's First Family — massive scale, cinematic set pieces, and a villain (the Old Power-wielding Skulls) designed for maximum visual spectacle. The run also contained one of comics' most emotionally effective death-and-legacy storylines, as Millar used the threat to the team's future as an opportunity to examine what the Fantastic Four's legacy would be if they were gone.

Christopher Priest's Black Panther is the run that made T'Challa a strategist: a head of state who joined the Avengers to keep an eye on them, narrated by a bewildered State Department official. Everett K. Ross narrating out of sequence is a structural gamble that pays off completely — the reader always knows less than T'Challa, which is the point. Priest also created the Dora Milaje here. This is the run every later Black Panther writer and the films are working from.

Reginald Hudlin's Black Panther run (2005–2008) brought the character into the mainstream spotlight at a pivotal moment. Hudlin, a Hollywood director and producer, approached the series with cinematic ambition — his opening arc 'Who Is the Black Panther?' was deliberately crafted as a film pitch and later adapted into an animated series. The run expands Wakandan mythology, introduces new villains, and pairs T'Challa with Storm of the X-Men in a high-profile royal wedding. Hudlin's tenure also features the celebrated 'Black to the Future' issue and cross-genre storytelling that pushed Wakanda into global relevance. This omnibus collects his complete run in one oversized hardcover, making it a valuable piece of Black Panther history.

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.

Deathstroke: The Terminator by Marv Wolfman Omnibus Vol. 2 continues the run by the character's co-creator, in which Slade Wilson gets his own series and turns out to work better as a lead than anyone expected of a Teen Titans villain.

The second Busiek and Pérez omnibus continues their Avengers run, the one that restored the team's scale and continuity after the Heroes Reborn detour. Ultron Unlimited is here, and it is the definitive Ultron story: an entire nation killed off-panel before the team arrives, and Pérez drawing hundreds of identical robots without losing a single face. Maximum Security is the other draw — the arc where Earth is declared a prison planet by the wider galaxy.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti wrote Harley Quinn for six years and turned her from a Batman villain into a lead who carries her own neighbourhood. Conner and Palmiotti write Harley as fundamentally decent and completely unhinged, and the Coney Island supporting cast, her tenants, her roller derby team, her rescued animals, is the reason the run works. Conner's art is among the most expressive in mainstream comics and the book is genuinely funny rather than edgy.

Wonder Woman by Gail Simone Omnibus collects the longest run any woman has written on the character, and the one most often named when readers argue about the best modern Wonder Woman. Simone writes Diana as a warrior who genuinely enjoys the fight, surrounds her with a real supporting cast, and never treats compassion and violence as opposites. Includes the landmark issue #600.

Azzarello and Chiang threw out the Amazon utopia and rebuilt Wonder Woman as Greek myth done properly: a family of gods who are cruel because that is what gods are, and a daughter caught in their politics. Blood and Guts collects the opening of the run everyone still points to.

The original Wonder Woman, written by the psychologist who invented the lie detector and drew on his own theories about submission, dominance and a better world run by women. Marston and Harry G. Peter's comics are far stranger than their reputation and this is where they start.

The sixth and final Golden Age volume covers the handover: Marston is dead, Robert Kanigher takes the book over, and Harry G. Peter keeps drawing it until the end of the era. It is the last stretch of the original Wonder Woman before the Silver Age reinvented her.

The Silver Age Wonder Woman is a different book entirely: Wonder Girl, Wonder Tot, Mer-Boy, impossible machines and a version of Paradise Island run on pure invention. Kanigher and Ross Andru made comics for children that are far weirder than anything aimed at adults.

Diana has given up the identity, Donna Troy is wearing the costume, and the villains show up to take advantage of a Wonder Woman who is not the real one. Heinberg and the Dodsons wrote the relaunch that had to answer, in public, what the character is actually for.

Warren Ellis's Wolverine work collects his two acclaimed storylines — Not Dead Yet and Dying Time — along with associated material from his run on the character. Ellis brought the same cold, precise approach to Wolverine that had made his Iron Man Extremis arc so effective: stripping away the mythology to find the important character underneath, then using that distillation to construct high-concept action stories that worked as character studies simultaneously. McTeigue's Not Dead Yet storyline in particular is frequently cited as the best standalone Wolverine arc of the 2000s.

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.

JSA by Geoff Johns Omnibus Vol. 2 collects the team's most celebrated middle era. Now firmly Geoff Johns's book (with David S. Goyer co-writing much of the stretch), the Justice Society becomes a DC flagship through arcs like "Princes of Darkness," "Black Reign", the Black Adam turn that reshaped the character, and "Waking the Sandman." The legacy-mentorship dynamic deepens as the old guard and the new generation are tested. Core art by Leonard Kirk and Don Kramer, with Rags Morales and others.

Mark Gruenwald's monumental Captain America run begins here — over a decade of stories that defined the character through the 1980s and early 1990s. Gruenwald was a Marvel lifer who understood Cap at a molecular level, and this first omnibus showcases his extraordinary commitment to building a coherent mythology around Steve Rogers. The Flag-Smasher, the Serpent Society, and the early ULTIMATUM storylines are among the highlights of a run that remains important reading for anyone who wants to understand how Cap was written before Brubaker changed everything.

The Flash: The Rebirth Deluxe Edition Book 1 opens Joshua Williamson's run, in which a Speed Force storm gives half of Central City super-speed and Barry Allen has to work out who to train, who to stop and who is lying to him. Art by Carmine Di Giandomenico.

The Flash: The Rebirth Deluxe Edition Book 3 continues Joshua Williamson's run through its middle stretch, as Barry Allen's relationship with the Rogues and with his own legacy gets considerably more complicated.