Marvel & DC Omnibus

G. Willow Wilson and Marcio Takara turned a Batman villain into the lead of a body horror road story. Betrayed and dying, Pamela Isley leaves Gotham to spread a fungus that will end humanity, and the book never asks the reader to decide whether she is wrong, only how far she is willing to go.

The second deluxe volume takes Pamela Isley past the point of no return. Wilson and Takara move the story from the road back into Gotham, where Ivy has to decide what to do with a cure she never asked for and a relationship she cannot fit into the plan she made for the end of the world.

Dashiell Bad Horse comes back to the Prairie Rose reservation after fifteen years away, working undercover for the FBI against the tribal boss who runs the new casino. Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera wrote the best crime comic of its decade by refusing to let anyone in it be simply guilty or simply innocent.

Bad Horse finally knows who killed his mother, and knowing it does not save anybody. The second omnibus takes Scalped through its last thirty issues, where every character has to pay for the choices made in the first half and Aaron refuses to hand out a single clean ending.

Jesse Custer keeps walking across America looking for a God who abandoned his own creation, and the further he gets the less the joke protects anybody. The second omnibus is where Ennis and Dillon stop playing and the friendships, the Saint of Killers and the Grail all come due at once.

Scott Free escaped Apokolips, escaped Granny Goodness and escaped every trap ever built for him, and then one day he tries to kill himself. King and Gerads use the nine panel grid to tell a story about depression, marriage and a war on New Genesis that may or may not be happening at all.

Christopher Chance makes a living impersonating the people who want to stay alive. He takes a bullet meant for Lex Luthor, gets twelve days to live, and spends them investigating his own murder with the entire Justice League International as suspects. King and Smallwood play it as a 1960s cocktail party with a countdown running.

Kirby left the Fourth World unfinished when DC cancelled it, and for twenty years other people tried to end it for him. This second omnibus collects what came after: the returns, the continuations and the eventual conclusion of the New Gods, from the 1970s through to the writers who inherited Apokolips.

Lono was the worst man in 100 Bullets, and this is the story of him trying to stop. Azzarello and Risso send him to a Mexican mission where he works with the priest and the orphans, and then let the cartel next door find out exactly what kind of animal has been living quietly across the road.

The Anti-Life Equation wakes up and Darkseid has to ask Earth's heroes for help, which tells you how bad it is. Starlin splits the cast into teams across four worlds and then kills a planet to prove the stakes were never rhetorical, in the series that made Mike Mignola's name before Hellboy.

Death of the Endless spends one day every century living as a mortal, so that she understands what she takes. Gaiman gives her two miniseries of her own, and Chris Bachalo draws her as the least frightening thing in any room she walks into.

Fables came back after ending at issue 150, and The Black Forest picks up with the survivors of Fabletown facing what the peace actually cost them. Willingham and Buckingham work together again on the run that closed one of the longest Vertigo series ever published.

Mitchell Hundred can talk to machines, spent a year as a costumed hero, and then got elected Mayor of New York on the strength of it. Brian K. Vaughan writes fifty issues about the superhero problem nobody else touches: what happens when the guy in the cape has to run a city council meeting.

The third Bronze Age volume of DC's horror anthology, where Cain introduces short stories that run from genuinely nasty to openly comic. This is the era when the Comics Code loosened and the artists on these books, Wrightson, Aparo, Toth and Kaluta, were allowed to draw what they wanted.

The companion anthology to House of Mystery, hosted by Abel instead of Cain, and the book where Swamp Thing first appeared as a one off horror story. Monsters, witches and revenge tales drawn by the best artists DC had, at the moment the Code stopped being able to stop them.

Gwen Dylan digs graves for a living and eats a brain once a month to keep her memory, which means she inherits the dead person's unfinished business. Roberson and Allred built a monster comedy around it, with a were-terrier, a 1960s ghost and a paintbrush that makes death look like a party.

Palmiotti and Gray moved DC's scarred bounty hunter from the open range into 1880s Gotham City, where he works cases with Amadeus Arkham and finds the city was already rotten a century before Batman. All-Star Western ran the whole New 52 and is the best sustained western DC has published.

The Legion always assumed the 30th century was a utopia. Five Years Later opens with the utopia gone, the team disbanded and the survivors older, poorer and compromised. Giffen and the Bierbaums rebuilt the series as dense political science fiction and split the fanbase permanently.

The second half of the Five Years Later run takes the Legion through the Terra Mosaic and into the reboot that ended it. The Bierbaums keep writing after Giffen leaves, Stuart Immonen arrives as an artist nobody had heard of, and the series finishes by rewriting its own continuity out of existence.

Darkseid's curse comes due, the Legion loses members permanently and Levitz spends five hundred pages showing what a superhero team looks like when the losses stick. The Curse is the run that followed The Great Darkness Saga and is the better half of the two.

Someone is stealing the most powerful beings in the universe and nobody can work out who. The Great Darkness Saga keeps its villain hidden for most of its length, and when the answer arrives it is the single best use anyone has made of Darkseid outside Kirby's own comics.

A Green Lantern is taken hostage by a group DC calls terrorists and their side of the story turns out to be the one that holds up. King wrote The Omega Men straight out of the CIA and it shows: the book is about occupation, propaganda and what the word terrorist is doing in that sentence.

It is 2048 and a teenager who went viral serving corn dogs has just been elected President of the United States. Mark Russell wrote the funniest political satire DC has published, and then it stopped being funny when most of the jokes turned out to be predictions.

The final volume of Alan Moore's fantasy epic puts Promethea on trial in the Immateria and then ends the world, calmly and on purpose. Moore and J.H. Williams III spend the last issues turning the comics page itself into the subject, and the result is unlike anything else in the medium.