Marvel & DC Omnibus

The fifth Uncanny omnibus is the year the X-Men lose: Claremont's book heading into Mutant Massacre, with the team fractured and X-Factor operating separately. This stretch introduces Longshot and gives Nightcrawler his only solo miniseries of the era, both of which feed straight back into the main title. It is also where Claremont sets up the Marauders and the Morlock tunnels, so the volume works as the last calm before the crossover that ends the classic era.

Old Man Logan is Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's western, set fifty years after the villains won and Logan has spent decades refusing to pop his claws. The original story is a road trip across a America divided between supervillains, and the reason Logan will not fight is the best reveal Millar has written. Jeff Lemire's later run then brings the character into the present day and treats him as a man who has already lost everything and has to watch it happen again.

PRH presents Decimation as the aftermath of House of M, where mutants are nearly no more. The volume is about the shockwave after the event: not only what happened, but how the surviving mutant world reorganizes around loss and fear. This is the bridge from House of M into the next mutant status quo. It is useful for collectors because it gathers the immediate consequences in one place instead of scattering them across multiple X-books.

PRH frames this as Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon's uncensored Punisher MAX run in oversized format. The story drops Frank Castle into a crime war where Kingpin is not just a target, but a force capable of dragging him lower than usual. This is Punisher for readers who want the harsher MAX version rather than a superhero crossover shelf. Aaron and Dillon treat Frank's war as ugly, direct and psychologically punishing, with Kingpin acting as the pressure point for the whole run.

Brainiac is Superman's oldest intellectual equal, and this omnibus tracks his transformation from a green-skinned alien with a ray gun into a genuine cosmic threat. The post-Crisis Brainiac is the version everything since has been built on: not a robot but a mind that occupies bodies, collects cities and treats Superman as a specimen. Reading the arcs in sequence shows a deliberate rebuild rather than a series of guest appearances, which is not obvious when they are read separately.

Super Sons pairs Damian Wayne and Jon Kent, Batman's son and Superman's, as a superhero double act built entirely on mutual irritation. Peter Tomasi writes the dynamic as two kids who cannot stand each other and are stuck together, which is funnier and more genuine than the friendship the premise suggests. It is also one of the few DC books that works for a ten-year-old and an adult without condescending to either.

Jeff Lemire's Animal Man is a horror comic about a family: Buddy Baker's daughter turns out to be the avatar of the Red, and something in the Rot wants her. The first issue ends with one of the most genuinely disturbing images DC published that decade, and Travel Foreman's art makes the body horror physical in a way superhero comics normally avoid. Lemire writes Buddy as a father first, which is why the horror lands, the Rot is not after a superhero, it is after his child.

Dark Web is the crossover that finally put Marvel's two most famous clones in the same room: Ben Reilly, now calling himself Chasm, and Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen. Both leads have the same grievance — created as copies, discarded as spares — and the crossover lets them take Manhattan apart over it. It also carries the Gold Goblin series, in which a sane Norman Osborn tries to atone, which is the best thing to come out of the event and reads perfectly well on its own.

Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet is the defining Marvel cosmic event — the story in which Thanos assembles all six Infinity Gems, wipes out half of all life in the universe, and forces Earth's remaining heroes into a desperate, seemingly impossible counterattack.

The Longbow Hunters is the 1987 miniseries that took Green Arrow away from the Justice League, gave him Seattle and made him a grown man with a body count. Grell removed the trick arrows, the superheroics and most of the costume, and wrote a crime series about a middle-aged archer. It is one of the few DC characters permanently changed by a single miniseries, and the run that followed is far darker than the Green Arrow most readers know from television.

Geoff Johns spent nine years on Green Lantern, starting by bringing Hal Jordan back from the dead and ending with a cosmology of coloured emotions that DC still uses. Rebirth is the cleanest resurrection story DC has published, it explains a decade of Hal Jordan's villainy without dismissing it, and the Sinestro Corps War is where Johns' emotional spectrum first pays off. This volume takes the franchise from cancelled backwater to DC's second-biggest line.

Age of Apocalypse is the four-month experiment where Marvel cancelled every X-Men title and replaced it with its alternate-timeline equivalent, with no promise the old world was coming back. The commitment is what made it work: for four months there was no main universe to return to, and readers had to accept a world where Xavier is dead, Magneto leads the X-Men and half the cast is unrecognisable. It also introduced Blink, Dark Beast and X-Man, all of whom outlived the timeline.

Gotham Central is one of the finest comics DC has ever published: a police procedural set in Gotham City, following the Major Crimes Unit as they investigate murders, kidnappings and crimes in a city where Batman exists. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker write cops who resent Batman's existence while simultaneously depending on him, a fundamental tension that makes every case morally complex. Michael Lark's noir art defines the visual language of Gotham as a real city rather than a superhero backdrop. An absolute masterpiece.

Marvel's funniest criminal comedy, collected in its entirety. Boomerang, the Beetle, Speed Demon, Shocker, and the Chameleon: Spider-Man's B-list villains: attempt the most ambitious heist of their careers while spectacularly failing at every step. Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber blend absurdist humour with genuine character work, making you care about people who are objectively terrible at being criminals.

Spider-Man 2099 Omnibus Vol. 1 throws Peter David and Rick Leonardi's future Spider-Man into a neon Marvel dystopia where corporations, identity and violence have replaced the familiar New York street-level rhythm. Miguel O'Hara is not Peter Parker in a new costume; he is a different kind of Spider-Man, born from a harsher future and forced to turn survival into responsibility.

X-Men Legacy: Legion is Simon Spurrier writing David Haller, Charles Xavier's son, as a man whose thousands of personalities each hold a different superpower and none of them obey him. The premise lets Spurrier build a mental landscape as literal architecture, with powers locked in cells and negotiating for release. It is also a book about a son trying to prove he is not his father, published while Xavier was dead. Twenty-four issues, self-contained, and unlike almost anything else with an X on the cover.

The second half of Nick Spencer's Amazing Spider-Man, in which the long game with Norman Osborn and Kindred finally pays off. Sins Rising brings back the Sin-Eater with a genuinely nasty premise, and the Last Remains arc is the best Kindred material in the run. Spencer's ending is divisive, but the volume is where every thread he planted over four years gets pulled, and Sinister War puts most of the rogues' gallery in one place.

Thunderbolts Red is Daniel Way's run on the team, in which General Ross recruits Marvel's most violent characters and runs them as a black-ops unit. The roster is the joke and the point: Red Hulk, Punisher, Deadpool, Elektra and Venom on the same team, all of whom kill and none of whom take orders well. Way writes it as a war comic rather than a superhero book, and the tension comes from Ross being the only one with any interest in restraint.

Mutant Massacre is the crossover where the X-Men stop winning. This omnibus covers the run-up: the last stretch of Chris Claremont's book before the Marauders walk into the Morlock tunnels. The value is in what it gathers around Uncanny: the founding of X-Factor, the return of Jean Grey in Fantastic Four #286, and the Longshot and Nightcrawler miniseries that fed straight back into the main title. Read in this order, the Massacre stops being a shock and becomes the consequence of a year of pressure.

Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 1 begins DC's 1990s weekly Superman machine, where Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Superman and Man of Steel function as one coordinated reading order. The numbered triangles turn the line into a continuous serial rather than separate titles. Jurgens, Ordway, Stern and Simonson build the dense ecosystem that leads toward Death of Superman and the most interconnected Superman publishing era.

Brand New Day was Marvel's post-One More Day reset: Peter Parker single again, three issues a month, and a rotating team of writers running the book like a writers' room. Whatever you think of how the status quo was reached, the execution was strong: new villains that stuck (Mister Negative, Anti-Venom, Screwball), a genuine mystery in the Menace subplot, and a Spider-Man written as a broke twenty-something again. Volume 2 is where the new rogues start paying off.

The Flash: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1 follows Barry Allen's launch as the modern Flash, shaped by police science, strange accidents, clean superhero momentum and the first shape of the speedster idea. The appeal is seeing this DC period collected as one reading path, with its own tone, cast and visual rhythm.

Al Ewing's corner of the Krakoan era started as a spy thriller about a space agency and ended up carrying the most ambitious world-building of the whole line. X-Men Red is the best-reviewed X-book of the era: Storm on Arakko as a head of state, a constitutional crisis on Mars, and Vulcan finally written as a tragedy rather than a plot device. Ewing takes characters Marvel had discarded — Abigail Brand, Cable, Magneto — and gives each of them the arc that stuck.

Shadowland is the endpoint of Ed Brubaker's long Daredevil run and the Marvel event that asked what happens when Matt Murdock stops holding back. Having taken command of the Hand, he builds a fortress in Hell's Kitchen and starts governing it. Shadowland is usually sold as a crossover, but the core of it is a character study: Matt crosses a line with Bullseye that his friends cannot argue away, and Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Elektra spend the book deciding whether to save him or stop him. Having the tie-ins and Reborn in one volume is what makes the arc land, since the fallout is the point.