Thor: Heroes Return Omnibus Vol. 2

Jason Aaron wrote Thor for seven years, and his opening question was simple: what happens to a god when he stops being worthy of his own hammer. God of Thunder opens with Gorr the God Butcher across three timelines at once — young Thor, present Thor and King Thor — which is the best Thor story anyone has written and the direct source for the fourth film. Jane Foster then takes the hammer while dying of cancer, and Aaron refuses to make that easy.

One of the absolute pinnacles of American superhero comics. Simonson introduces Beta Ray Bill (a horse alien who proves himself worthy of Mjölnir), brings back Surtur as a cosmic menace, transforms Thor into a frog, and elevated the character's mythology to unseen heights. If you're only going to read one Thor in your life, make it this one.

The second Aaron omnibus completes the run: Jane Foster's tenure ends, Thor gets his hammer back, and the War of the Realms finally arrives after six years of build-up. Aaron plants the War of the Realms in his first year and pays it off in his last, which almost nobody at Marvel gets to do. King Thor is the ending: the last god at the end of the universe, closing the three-timeline structure he opened with. It is one of the few complete, self-contained superhero runs of the era.

Donny Cates and Nic Klein took over Thor immediately after Jason Aaron, with Thor newly crowned King of Asgard and completely unsuited to the job. The premise is that ruling is harder than fighting, and Cates keeps finding ways to make it worse: the Black Winter, Donald Blake returning as a villain, and Thor's father problems becoming policy problems. Klein's art is the other reason — his Asgard looks like a real place with weather.

J. Michael Straczynski relaunched Thor in 2007 after Asgard had been destroyed and the character absent from Marvel for three years. Straczynski's move was to rebuild Asgard as a floating town in rural Oklahoma, with gods as immigrants in the American Midwest, and it is the best Thor premise since Kirby. Kieron Gillen then takes over and writes Loki's turn, and Siege closes Marvel's Dark Reign era from Asgard's point of view.

The second Mighty Thor omnibus continues the Lee and Kirby run at the point where Asgard stops being a backdrop and becomes the subject. Kirby's late-sixties Thor is where his cosmic period begins — the designs, the machinery, the gods drawn as forces rather than people — and it leads directly into the Fourth World he built at DC. Everything Marvel has done with Asgard since is working from these pages.

The Mighty Thor Omnibus Vol. 5 closes the classic pre-Simonson stretch, with Gerry Conway, Len Wein and John Buscema guiding Thor through late Bronze Age Asgard before the next generational change. The value is transition: old mythic machinery preparing to hand the hammer forward. Its shelf value is transition: the late Bronze Age Thor machine preparing the ground for the next great reinvention while still rooted in Buscema's classical Asgard.

The fourth Mighty Thor omnibus covers the early seventies, after Kirby left and Marvel had to work out what Thor was without him. Gerry Conway and John Buscema take over, and the run turns toward long cosmic quests — the search for Odin, the Ego-Prime storyline, Mephisto — while keeping the Asgardian supporting cast intact. Buscema's Thor is more classical than Kirby's, and this stretch is where the character settles into the form he kept for a decade.

The Death and Return of Superman is not just the day Superman falls; it is the whole shockwave after the fall. Doomsday turns the fight into a public wound, Metropolis has to imagine a world without Clark Kent, and four new figures step into the empty space where Superman used to stand. This omnibus keeps the event, grief and rebirth together as one huge DC turning point.

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.

Superman: The Triangle Era, collected complete as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. 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. Second volume with the central arcs of the Triangle Era experiment: the time when editorial coordination between the four Superman titles was at its creative peak, with weekly crossover sagas and consequences that spanned months. The heart of an entire decade of the character's history, culminating in the run-up to the Death of Superman. Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, and Louise Simonson write complementary threads that reward reading in publication order. The most ambitious Superman publishing experiment ever attempted. Superman: Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 3 keeps the 1990s Superman machine moving through linked weekly storytelling, where Clark's personal life, Metropolis, supporting cast and superhero threats all feed into one another. Dan Jurgens, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Jon Bogdanove and Tom Grummett make the line feel like a living city.

Superman: Action Comics by Dan Jurgens, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Dan Jurgens returned to Superman for DC's Rebirth initiative in 2016, at a moment when there were two Supermen in continuity and neither the reader nor the characters knew why. Jurgens had written the Death of Superman twenty-five years earlier, and Rebirth let him write the reunion: a Superman with a wife and son, restored after five years of a version DC had struggled to sell. The mystery of the second Clark Kent is also the cleanest piece of continuity repair DC has managed. The second Dan Jurgens Action Comics omnibus continues his Rebirth run, with Superman balancing a family, a legacy and threats that keep escalating. Jurgens writes Superman as a working father, which is the version he has always been best at, and the run keeps returning to the question of what Clark owes Jon. The Mr. Oz storyline, the mystery of who has been watching Superman since Rebirth began, resolves here, and the answer is one DC had been holding for years.

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.

The Triangle Era is the name collectors give to the period when Superman's four monthly titles were numbered as one continuous weekly story. This third volume covers the aftermath of his death. This is Reign of the Supermen: four claimants to the name, none of them clearly Clark Kent, and a mystery that ran across every title for months. Hunter/Prey is the sequel to the death itself. It is the most commercially successful Superman story ever published, and the triangle numbering means it only reads properly collected like this.

This volume closes the Clone Saga and Ben Reilly's full run as the one true Spider-Man, ending with Revelations, the storyline that killed Ben, brought back Norman Osborn and reset Peter Parker as the hero. It gathers the four 1996-97 Spider-Man ongoings plus Redemption and The Osborn Journal in one oversized hardcover, the definitive way to read the end of the 1990s Spider-Man era in order.

Second volume with the central arcs of the Triangle Era experiment: the time when editorial coordination between the four Superman titles was at its creative peak, with weekly crossover sagas and consequences that spanned months. The heart of an entire decade of the character's history, culminating in the run-up to the Death of Superman. Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, and Louise Simonson write complementary threads that reward reading in publication order. The most ambitious Superman publishing experiment ever attempted.