Superman: Emperor Joker The Deluxe Edition

In 1992 DC killed Superman and the story made the evening news. Thirty years later this edition collects it as a single book. Doomsday is the rare villain who works precisely because he has no personality — no motive, no dialogue, just forward motion — and the escalating panel counts across the final issues are one of the smartest formal tricks in mainstream comics. Whatever you think of the stunt, it is the best-selling comic story ever published.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely wrote All Star Superman outside continuity in 2005, with a single premise: Superman is dying and has twelve labours left. Morrison treats every era of the character as true at once — the Silver Age absurdities, the Golden Age social crusader, the modern icon — and Quitely draws him as physically calm in a way nobody else manages. Issue #10 is widely considered the best single Superman comic ever published. It requires no prior reading at all.

PRH presents this as Grant Morrison's bold New 52 reimagining of Superman. The run starts from a more raw, early-career Man of Steel and builds toward stranger, larger threats without losing the idea of Superman as a social and moral force. This is the compact shelf for Morrison's New 52 Superman: part origin energy, part cosmic experiment, part statement about what Superman means when the myth is rebuilt from the street upward.

Injustice began as a tie-in to the fighting game and became one of DC's longest-running alternate universes, built on a single irreversible act: the Joker tricks Superman into killing Lois Lane and their unborn child. Injustice works because it takes its premise seriously: the heroes who side with Superman have reasons, and the ones who oppose him lose. It is the most accessible DC alternate universe on the shelf, with no continuity required, and this omnibus replaces three years of scattered digital-first collections with a single volume.

The United States has had its own Superman since 1945, kept in a hangar and used when the official one would say no. Snyder and Jim Lee use him to ask what Superman is for in a country that would rather have a weapon, and Lee draws the biggest pages of his career doing it.

Superboy Prime raises an army of every villain the Legion ever fought, so the Legion answers by fielding three versions of itself from three timelines at once. Johns and Perez drew every Legionnaire who has ever existed onto the same page and somehow kept it readable.

The Joker steals Mister Mxyzptlk's power, takes control of reality, and spends every day destroying Batman and putting him back together for the next morning. Emperor Joker is the crossover where the Superman books went as far as they could go and then explained why the Joker could never win.

Superman is dying, and instead of fighting it he spends the time left settling his affairs: telling Lois the truth, curing cancer, and answering the one question his father never got to ask. All-Star Superman is the argument that the character works best when he has nothing left to prove.

Before The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale produced three Halloween specials for Legends of the Dark Knight between 1993 and 1995. They are where the pair worked out the seasonal structure and noir framing that would define their later work together. Haunted Knight is short, and that is its strength: three complete stories that show Loeb and Sale finding their voice in real time. Read before The Long Halloween it supplies context; read after it works as a set of character studies about fear and obligation. For collectors of the Loeb/Sale run, it is the missing first volume.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale followed their Halloween specials with a thirteen-issue murder mystery set during Batman’s early years, when Gotham still belonged to the Falcone family and the costumed criminals were only beginning to appear. It was conceived as a direct sequel to Frank Miller’s Year One and became the template for a generation of Batman crime stories. The Long Halloween is one of the few Batman stories that works equally as detective fiction and as tragedy: the mystery holds up, but the real subject is a good man being destroyed in slow motion. Tim Sale’s silhouettes and Gregory Wright’s seasonal colour make each chapter feel like a different month. It is the book Christopher Nolan drew on most heavily for The Dark Knight, and it remains the standard recommendation for a reader’s second Batman purchase after Year One.

The Joker steals Mister Mxyzptlk's power, takes control of reality, and spends every day destroying Batman and putting him back together for the next morning. Emperor Joker is the crossover where the Superman books went as far as they could go and then explained why the Joker could never win.

Batman: Dark Victory Deluxe Edition collects the direct sequel to The Long Halloween, in which a new killer targets Gotham's police while Batman drifts further from the people who anchor him. It is also the book where Dick Grayson arrives, which makes it the origin of the partnership as much as a murder mystery.

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.

Superman/Batman Omnibus Vol. 1 is built around the simplest DC contrast and one of its strongest: Superman and Batman together, friends despite everything that should make them opposites. Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness lean into scale, speed and iconography, making the partnership feel huge without losing the personal spark.

Superman: Our Worlds at War Omnibus Vol. 2 focuses on DC's war-scale Superman event, with Superman shaped by cosmic conflict, grief, heroism under pressure and the cost paid by people around Superman. The appeal is not only continuity; it is watching a specific DC period find its tone, cast and visual rhythm.

Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness delivered one of the most visually spectacular Hulk runs in the character's history, built around a simple but electrifying premise: a Red Hulk. The mysterious Rulk tore through the Marvel Universe, defeating Thor, Iron Man, and the Watcher himself in rapid succession, and no one knew who was under the red skin. This omnibus collects the full Loeb run that launched the Red Hulk concept and triggered a wave of gamma-powered characters. McGuinness's art is pure kinetic energy — oversized, dynamic, and designed for maximum impact. It's a blockbuster run that prioritizes spectacle, delivered with genuine craft.