Scott Snyder

Batman Eternal was DC's attempt at a weekly Batman series: fifty-two issues published in a year, plotted by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV with a rotating writing team. The premise is a slow-motion demolition of Gotham's institutions: Jim Gordon imprisoned for a crash he did not cause, Falcone back in the city, and Batman losing the police force, Arkham and eventually Wayne Enterprises. A weekly schedule forces a plot that never idles, and at fifty-two issues in one volume it reads closer to a season of television than to a comic run.

The Black Mirror was Scott Snyder’s first major DC work, published while Bruce Wayne was absent and Dick Grayson was wearing the cowl. It established Snyder as a Batman writer and led directly to his New 52 run with Greg Capullo. This is Gotham written as horror rather than crime: the threat is a quiet, articulate young man who explains himself calmly, and the tension comes from a father who already knows what his son is. It also makes the strongest case ever published for Dick Grayson as Batman, which is why it stands alone even for readers who skip the surrounding continuity.

Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV wrote Justice League as cosmology: the Source Wall breaks and the forces that built the universe start taking sides. The premise is that the Justice League have been fighting the wrong war: the Legion of Doom is trying to unmake reality's rules rather than rob a bank. The Batman Who Laughs is included here for good reason, it is the best thing to come out of the era and it reads as the run's real antagonist.

Justice League by Snyder & Tynion, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV wrote Justice League as cosmology: the Source Wall breaks and the forces that built the universe start taking sides. The premise is that the Justice League have been fighting the wrong war: the Legion of Doom is trying to unmake reality's rules rather than rob a bank. The Batman Who Laughs is included here for good reason, it is the best thing to come out of the era and it reads as the run's real antagonist. The second Snyder and Tynion omnibus takes the Justice League run to its conclusion, through the Year of the Villain and the rise of the Batman Who Laughs. The Batman Who Laughs stops being a crossover villain here and becomes the character DC built a whole line around: a Bruce Wayne infected by the Joker who is smarter than either. Hell Arisen is where he wins, briefly and completely, and it leads directly into Dark Nights: Death Metal.

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.

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.

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.

The second Snyder and Tynion omnibus takes the Justice League run to its conclusion, through the Year of the Villain and the rise of the Batman Who Laughs. The Batman Who Laughs stops being a crossover villain here and becomes the character DC built a whole line around: a Bruce Wayne infected by the Joker who is smarter than either. Hell Arisen is where he wins, briefly and completely, and it leads directly into Dark Nights: Death Metal.

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.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Book Two Deluxe Edition continues the run as the Legion of Doom gains ground and the League has to consider whether the rules of reality can be rewritten in their favour. Jorge Jimenez handles most of the art.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Deluxe Edition Book Three closes the run, bringing the war between Justice and Doom to its conclusion and setting up Dark Nights: Death Metal. It is the payoff to everything Snyder had been building since Metal.

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo defined Batman for the New 52 era, and this pack brings their entire run together in two oversized omnibus volumes. It opens with The Court of Owls, a secret society hidden inside Gotham's history, runs through Death of the Family and Zero Year, and closes with Endgame, the definitive Joker war, plus Superheavy and Bloom. One of the most acclaimed and best-selling Batman runs of the modern era, collected complete.

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo relaunched Batman for the New 52 in 2011 and stayed for fifty issues, producing the best-selling Batman run of the modern era. The Court of Owls does something few writers manage: it adds a piece of Gotham history that feels like it was always there. Death of the Family then brings back a faceless Joker aimed at the whole Bat-family, and Zero Year retells the origin without repeating Year One. Capullo's Gotham is the visual reference point for the decade that followed.

The second Snyder and Capullo omnibus takes their run to its end, through Endgame and Superheavy, and asks what Gotham does when Batman is genuinely gone. Endgame is the best Joker story of the modern era: no theatricality, no motive, just a threat that treats Batman as a natural phenomenon to be studied. Superheavy then puts Jim Gordon in a mech suit as a city-sanctioned Batman, which is a far better idea than it sounds. It closes the run properly rather than handing off mid-arc.

Nightwing: The Prince of Gotham Omnibus follows Dick Grayson through the New 52 period, where Haly's Circus, Gotham's secrets and Forever Evil push his public and private identities to breaking point. Kyle Higgins writes Nightwing as mobile, exposed and emotionally open in a way that separates him from Batman's shadow. The value is character clarity: this is Dick trying to own the symbol, the city connections and the cost of being seen.

Batman and Robin Eternal was the second weekly Bat-series, published while Bruce Wayne had no memory of being Batman and Dick Grayson was working as a spy. The hook is that Bruce is unavailable, so the entire Bat-family has to solve it without him and without being able to ask what he knew. It also introduces Cassandra Cain to the post-Flashpoint continuity, arriving in Gotham as a silent young woman looking for Batman, which is the best version of that entrance anyone has written.

Dark Nights: Metal Omnibus collects Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's event and every tie-in, in which Batman's obsessive investigating tears open the Dark Multiverse and lets seven nightmare versions of himself into reality. It is the story that gave DC the Batman Who Laughs, and it is deliberately the loudest, most excessive thing Snyder and Capullo ever made together.

The complete Death Metal event in one volume: the main series, every tie-in and the specials, in the direct market exclusive variant edition. Snyder and Capullo close out their decade of Batman with the Batman Who Laughs ruling a scrapyard Earth and Wonder Woman coming to take it back with a chainsaw.

Dark Nights: Death Metal Omnibus collects the sequel to Metal and every tie-in: the Batman Who Laughs has won, Perpetua rules a broken multiverse, and Wonder Woman leads what is left of the resistance. Snyder and Capullo use it to settle DC's entire continuity problem at once, and it ends with the multiverse rebuilt as the Infinite Frontier.

Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One Deluxe Edition opens the run that followed Dark Nights: Metal, in which the League discovers that the universe runs on two competing forces and that Lex Luthor has picked the other side. Art by Jim Cheung and Jorge Jimenez.