Greg Rucka

Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Fugitive is the year DC arrested Batman's alter ego for homicide and made the Bat-family investigate their own mentor. The interesting half is the second one: Bruce responds to the frame-up by deciding Bruce Wayne was always the disguise and refusing to go back, which forces everyone around him to argue that the man matters as much as the mask. It is the best use DC has made of the secret identity in decades.

No Man's Land is the year DC declared Gotham dead. After the earthquake of Cataclysm, the United States government evacuates the city, dynamites the bridges and leaves whoever stays behind to divide the ruins into territories. The premise strips Batman of everything except the city itself: no infrastructure, no law, and gang leaders marking blocks with spray paint. It is also where Cassandra Cain becomes Batgirl. Volume 1 is the opening third of the crossover, in reading order across every Bat-title, which is the only way it works.

Road to No Man's Land is the run-up to DC's biggest Batman event of the nineties. A cataclysmic earthquake levels Gotham, and these are the months in which the city falls apart before Washington writes it off entirely. This is the volume most readers skip and then need: No Man's Land makes far more sense when you have watched Bane escape, Azrael struggle for legitimacy and Gotham's infrastructure fail one system at a time. Chuck Dixon coordinates a dozen titles into a single collapse, and the omnibus finally puts the whole crossover in reading order instead of scattered across four series.

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.

Wonder Woman by Greg Rucka Omnibus gives Diana a run built on diplomacy, public scrutiny and myth rather than simple superhero spectacle. Rucka treats Wonder Woman as an ambassador with enemies in both Olympus and the modern world, supported by grounded political tension and the moral weight of representing Themyscira. The result is a character-led DC omnibus for readers who want Diana's ideals tested in public, private and divine arenas without reducing her to a supporting Justice League icon.

Infinite Crisis was DC's 2005 event and the twenty-year sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths, built to fix a universe the company had let get too dark. The four lead-in miniseries are the reason to own it collected: the event only makes sense if you have seen Batman build the OMACs, Wonder Woman kill on camera and Superman refuse to intervene. It is also the moment DC brought back the multiverse it had spent two decades insisting was gone.

Final Crisis is Grant Morrison's 2008 event, in which Darkseid wins on page one and the rest of the story is about what happens to a universe after evil has already taken it. Morrison writes it as a deconstruction of superhero comics themselves: the Anti-Life Equation spreads as a meme, reality degrades into fragments, and the narrative structure breaks down with it. It is DC's most formally difficult event and its most rewarding on a reread, and Batman R.I.P. runs directly into it.

New Krypton is the storyline in which a hundred thousand surviving Kryptonians arrive on Earth and Superman stops being the last of his kind. The premise is the best Superman question anyone has asked recently: what does he do when his people arrive and they are not like him. The Kryptonians are militaristic, entitled and legally separate, and Superman has to choose between them and Earth. It ran across every Superman title for two years and only reads properly collected.

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.

Batwoman Omnibus collects the run that gave Kate Kane her definitive form, starting with Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III's Elegy. Williams changes art style with every shift in register, painted when Batwoman is on the page, clean line when Kate is, and it remains one of the most formally ambitious superhero comics ever published.

Batman: No Man's Land, collected as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Road to No Man's Land is the run-up to DC's biggest Batman event of the nineties. A cataclysmic earthquake levels Gotham, and these are the months in which the city falls apart before Washington writes it off entirely. This is the volume most readers skip and then need: No Man's Land makes far more sense when you have watched Bane escape, Azrael struggle for legitimacy and Gotham's infrastructure fail one system at a time. Chuck Dixon coordinates a dozen titles into a single collapse, and the omnibus finally puts the whole crossover in reading order instead of scattered across four series. No Man's Land is the year DC declared Gotham dead. After the earthquake of Cataclysm, the United States government evacuates the city, dynamites the bridges and leaves whoever stays behind to divide the ruins into territories. The premise strips Batman of everything except the city itself: no infrastructure, no law, and gang leaders marking blocks with spray paint. It is also where Cassandra Cain becomes Batgirl. Volume 1 is the opening third of the crossover, in reading order across every Bat-title, which is the only way it works. The second act of No Man's Land, with Gotham still abandoned by the United States and divided into territories held by whoever can defend them. This is where the crossover stops being about survival and starts being about who gets to govern: the Penguin running an economy, Two-Face holding a courthouse, and Batman losing ground he cannot afford. Reading it in the omnibus order is the only way the parallel storylines make sense.

Collects the entire Tangled Web anthology (2001-2003), the series that handed Spider-Man to some of comics' strongest voices and let them look away from the hero. Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Rhino two-parter, Greg Rucka and Eduardo Risso's noir, and Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo's tales sit alongside work by Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and Paul Pope, all in one hardcover.

52 Omnibus follows DC's weekly year after Infinite Crisis, when Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are absent from the centre of the universe. Booster Gold, Renee Montoya, Black Adam, The Question, Steel and Ralph Dibny carry a rotating ensemble story about a world trying to function without its usual icons.

The second act of No Man's Land, with Gotham still abandoned by the United States and divided into territories held by whoever can defend them. This is where the crossover stops being about survival and starts being about who gets to govern: the Penguin running an economy, Two-Face holding a courthouse, and Batman losing ground he cannot afford. Reading it in the omnibus order is the only way the parallel storylines make sense.

Batwoman by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman is the most visually ambitious book DC has published this century. Williams draws each sequence in a different style depending on whether Kate Kane is in or out of costume, and builds page layouts shaped like bat symbols that still read correctly. Kate is also DC's most prominent lesbian lead, and the run treats her military discharge under Don't Ask, Don't Tell as central rather than background.