Marvel & DC Omnibus

Under the Red Hood undid the most permanent death in Batman’s history. Judd Winick brought Jason Todd back not as a redemption story but as an indictment, and the arc has shaped every Batman and Robin story written since. Winick refuses to let Batman answer that question comfortably, and the book is stronger for it. At 544 pages this is the complete storyline rather than the abridged version, including Annual #25’s explanation of the resurrection, and it reads as the direct sequel to A Death in the Family.

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus brings the rare cross-publisher meetings back into one oversized volume: Superman and Spider-Man, Batman and Captain America, the X-Men and Teen Titans, Punisher crossovers and the DC/Marvel battles that were out of print for decades.

Batman: Arkham Asylum The Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's painted graphic novel, one of the strangest and best-selling Batman books ever published. On April Fool's Day the inmates take the asylum and demand Batman walk in alone; interleaved with that night is the diary of Amadeus Arkham, the psychologist who built the place after his mother's death. McKean's mixed-media artwork, paint, photography and collage, makes it unlike any other Batman comic.

All-Star Batman by Scott Snyder: The Deluxe Edition collects Snyder's complete post-New 52 run, in which he hands Batman a different A-list artist every arc and sends him out of Gotham. It opens with Batman driving Two-Face across the country while every bounty hunter and civilian in America tries to stop him, and keeps escalating from there. Art by John Romita Jr., Jock, Sean Murphy, Afua Richardson, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Tula Lotay.

The Batman Who Laughs: The Deluxe Edition collects Scott Snyder and Jock's New York Times bestselling mini-series, in which the Batman of a dead universe — infected by the Joker's toxin and gifted with the ability to think exactly like him — comes to the main DC Earth with a plan for Bruce Wayne specifically. Includes The Grim Knight, the origin of his equally lethal lieutenant.

Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo: The Deluxe Edition collects Marc Silvestri's series, in which Batman and the Joker are forced to work together after Gordon is kidnapped and Harley Quinn goes missing. Silvestri writes and draws, which he rarely does.

Detective Comics #1000: The Deluxe Edition collects the thousandth issue of the longest-running comic in America, with short stories by most of the writers and artists who have defined Batman over the last forty years.

Mark Waid and Dan Mora took the oldest team-up in superhero comics and made it feel new by refusing to make it grim. Their World's Finest is set in a bright, slightly retro past where Batman and Superman still trust each other, Robin is a boy wonder again and the Doom Patrol, the Devil Nezha and the Metal Men all get their turn.

Tom King and Phil Hester go back to 1961 and tell Gotham's original sin without Batman in it. Private investigator Slam Bradley takes the kidnapping case of Helen Wayne, heir to the Wayne fortune, and what he finds is a city already rotten with police corruption and racial violence long before anyone put on a cape.

A white collar criminal fakes insanity to dodge prison and lands in Arkham Asylum, where the joke stops being funny about four hours in. Dan Slott and Ryan Sook tell Arkham from the inside as a prison drama, with Batman appearing only when the place has already done its work.

Ego is Bruce Wayne sitting in the cave arguing with Batman about whether either of them should exist. Darwyn Cooke drew it in 2000 and it remains the cleanest statement anybody has made about what the character costs the man, collected here with the rest of his Batman and Catwoman work.

After Jason Todd is murdered, Batman starts working alone, angry and out of control, and Alfred calls Nightwing because nobody else will say it to his face. Marv Wolfman uses Dick Grayson's own past to explain what Batman does to the people he takes in, and what the man who killed the Waynes has been doing since.

The Batman Who Laughs has won, the Earth is a scrapyard ruled by dark multiverse versions of everyone, and Wonder Woman has to put a chainsaw through it. Snyder and Capullo close their decade of Batman with the loudest book either of them has drawn, and it is deliberately ridiculous.

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.

Rafael Grampá writes and draws his own Gotham, a city so filthy and so detailed that Batman looks like part of the architecture. It is a Black Label book about a serial killer, and the reason to buy it is that nobody draws like Grampá.

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.

Scott Snyder relaunched Swamp Thing for the New 52 alongside his Batman run, turning Alec Holland into the reluctant avatar of a green kingdom at war with rot. Rotworld is the crossover with Jeff Lemire's Animal Man, and reading the two together is the point, the Animal Man chapters are included here for exactly that reason. Yanick Paquette's page layouts, with borders that grow like plants, are among the most beautiful in DC's modern output.

Hal Jordan first wore a Green Lantern ring in 1959, in a reinvention that turned a 1940s crime-fighter with a magic lantern into science fiction with an interstellar police force behind it. This is where the mythology gets built piece by piece: Sinestro, Star Sapphire, the Guardians of the Universe and the idea that the ring runs on willpower. Gil Kane's figure work is the other reason to read it, he drew flight better than anyone in the era, and the designs have barely changed since.

Wonder Woman: Rebirth by Greg Rucka Omnibus collects Rucka's return to the character, built around a problem no other writer had dared name: after years of reboots, Diana's own memories no longer agree with each other. The run alternates between a present-day investigation and a retold origin, with art by Liam Sharp and Nicola Scott, and turns continuity chaos into the actual subject of the story.

Wonder Woman by John Byrne Omnibus collects the run in which Byrne wrote and drew Diana himself, introduced Cassie Sandsmark as Wonder Girl, and killed Diana off to make her a goddess on Olympus. It is the most eventful stretch of 1990s Wonder Woman and the source of characters still in use today.

An oracle tells Wonder Woman that the Justice League will die fighting a dragon, so she takes the League out of the fight herself, one member at a time, and goes alone. Christopher Moeller painted the entire book, and it remains the best argument that Diana is the most dangerous person on the team.

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.