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Absolute Batman (2024)
Published
The cleanest door back into DC. Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta started this Batman from zero in October 2024, in a separate universe where nothing you missed counts. This Bruce Wayne grew up working class without the family fortune and holds down a day job as an engineer, and Alfred has never been anyone's butler. The result feels like the Batman you remember, rebuilt with different parts, so the surprises land harder if you know the original.
DC reported it as the bestselling comic of 2024, which means reprints and collected volumes are easy to find at any shop.
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Ultimate Spider-Man by Jonathan Hickman (2024)
Published
A finished Spider-Man story with a real ending, which is rare. Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto give you a Peter Parker who never got his powers as a teenager and only puts on the suit as a grown man, already married to Mary Jane with kids. The run closed with issue #24, so the collected volumes read straight through without a cliffhanger handed to the next writer.
Readers who left after the main series undid Peter and MJ's marriage will get the most out of it, because this version gives that family the room the regular books took away.
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Absolute Wonder Woman (2024)
Published
The companion to Absolute Batman, and arguably the bolder of the two. Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman's Diana was exiled to Hell as a baby and raised by the witch Circe, who in this version chooses to be the mother Diana needs instead of her enemy. Expect magic and monsters more than Greek myth and diplomacy.
It won the Eisner Award for Best New Series in 2025, and like the rest of DC's Absolute line it starts from nothing, so it is a safe buy for a reader who last saw Wonder Woman decades ago.
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Immortal Hulk (2018)
Published
If your Hulk was a sad man hitchhiking out of town, Al Ewing and Joe Bennett turned that loneliness into a horror comic. Banner keeps dying and the Hulk keeps bringing him back, usually after dark, and Bennett's body horror goes further than any Marvel book from the old spinner racks.
The run began in 2018 and ended with issue #50 in October 2021, so it is a closed story. It draws on decades of Hulk history, which rewards a returning reader who remembers some of it, but it explains what it needs as it goes.
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Mister Miracle (2017)
Published
Twelve issues, complete, and a good test of how far superhero comics have stretched. Tom King and Mitch Gerads take Jack Kirby's escape artist Scott Free and give equal weight to a war on Apokolips, his marriage to Big Barda and the arrival of a baby. Gerads builds most pages on a nine-panel grid, which gives the book a steady, uneasy rhythm.
It won the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series in 2019. Some readers find the ending deliberately open; that is part of the design, not a missing chapter.
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Hawkeye by Matt Fraction & David Aja Omnibus (2015)
Published
Matt Fraction and David Aja asked what Clint Barton does when he is not being an Avenger, and the answer became one of the most copied superhero books of the 2010s. Short, mostly self-contained stories follow Clint, Kate Bishop, his apartment building and a stray dog, drawn with a sharp, graphic design sense.
Issue #11, told from the dog's point of view, won the Eisner for Best Single Issue. You need to know nothing beyond "Avenger with a bow," and the whole run sits in this one omnibus.
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Daredevil by Mark Waid Omnibus (2017)
Published
For anyone who left when Daredevil was all grime and grief. Starting in 2011, Mark Waid and artists including Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin gave Matt Murdock his swagger back: bright pages, inventive ways of showing his radar sense and cases that end with a grin.
It won the Eisner for Best Continuing Series in 2012, and issue #7 took Best Single Issue. The old tragedies still count, which is the point: this is a hero deciding to be happy, and a reader who remembers what he went through feels the weight of that choice.
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Nightwing by Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo Omnibus (2025)
Published
The friendliest superhero book of the last few years. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo picked up Nightwing in 2021 with a simple hook: Alfred's will leaves Dick Grayson a fortune, and Dick decides to spend it fixing Blüdhaven rather than punching it into shape. Add a three-legged dog and a lot of warmth between Dick and his old friends, and it reads like the team books of the old days.
It won the Eisner for Best Continuing Series in 2023. If you remember Dick as Robin, this shows the grown man he became.
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All Star Superman (2006)
Published
The Superman story to hand anyone who thinks Superman is boring. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's twelve issues stand completely outside continuity: Superman learns he is dying and uses the time he has left to do every impossible, generous thing he can.
It is a love letter to the Silver Age Superman, full of oddball ideas from old comics played completely straight, so a reader with long memories catches twice as much. It has been reprinted constantly since, including in a pocket-sized edition, and needs nothing else on the shelf beside it.
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Batman / Superman: World's Finest (2022)
Published
The book that feels most like the comics you left behind, in the best sense. Mark Waid and Dan Mora launched it in March 2022 as straightforward Batman and Superman team-ups with a Silver Age spirit: big villains, bigger set pieces and two friends who actually like each other.
Mora's art is the draw. His pages have the clarity of classic DC with modern energy, and the series runs in arcs short enough to sample one collection before committing. If the darker books here feel like a lot, start with this one.
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House of X / Powers of X (2019)
Published
If you were an X-Men kid, this is the one that will make you sit up. Jonathan Hickman's two six-issue series, drawn by Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva and published between July and October 2019, read as one alternating story that turns the mutant island of Krakoa into a nation and rewrites what the X-Men are for.
It leans on decades of X-history, which is exactly why it suits a returning fan. The era it launched has since ended, so treat this collection as a complete, self-contained event rather than the start of a reading list.
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Ms. Marvel (2014)
7.6/10on Open Library
Published
The best introduction to a character created while you were away. G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona's Kamala Khan is a Pakistani American teenager in Jersey City who idolizes Carol Danvers and suddenly gets powers of her own. The comedy of family, school and fan obsession is as important as the fights.
This first volume won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2015. It also explains why so many newer heroes are legacy characters taking up old names, which is one of the bigger changes a returning reader will notice.
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Black Hammer (2016)
Published
A superhero comic about missing the superhero comics you grew up with. Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston strand a team of old-fashioned heroes on a farm outside a small town after a crisis, and the series slowly asks why they cannot leave and what they have lost.
The characters are loving riffs on Golden and Silver Age archetypes, so the jokes and the sadness both land harder for anyone with a long memory. It won the Eisner for Best New Series in 2017, and the main story is complete in a handful of collections from Dark Horse.
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Invincible Compendium (2011)
Published
The whole superhero universe of one creator, start to finish. Robert Kirkman, with co-creator Cory Walker and longtime artist Ryan Ottley, follows Mark Grayson, the teenage son of the world's greatest hero, from a cheerful Marvel-style beginning into something far more violent and surprising.
It ran 144 issues and ended for good in February 2018, so the three compendiums hold every page. If the TV adaptation is what pulled you back toward comics, the source goes much further, and it never needs a crossover to make sense.
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Transformers (2023) (2023)
Published
If you had the toys or the cartoon, this is the reunion. Daniel Warren Johnson wrote and drew the first 24 issues of Skybound's relaunch, starting in October 2023, with Autobots and Decepticons crash-landed on Earth and a small human cast caught between them. His art is heavy-metal loud and the fights hit like professional wrestling.
It won the 2024 Eisners for Best Continuing Series and Best Writer/Artist. It also shows how much licensed comics have changed: this is a showcase book now, not a toy catalog.
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Saga (2012)
Published
The creator-owned series to try first if capes are not what you came back for. Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples follow two soldiers from opposite sides of a galactic war who fall in love and go on the run with their newborn daughter, who narrates.
It won the Eisner for Best Continuing Series four times between 2013 and 2017. Know that it is frankly adult, with sex and gore on the page, and that it pauses between arcs, so the collected volumes are the comfortable way to read it.
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Paper Girls (2015)
Published
Made for anyone who was a kid in the 1980s. Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang start with four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls in the small town of Stony Stream, Ohio, in the early hours after Halloween 1988, then throw them through time, including into meetings with their own older selves.
That last part is what makes it hit for a returning reader: it is a story about looking at who you were. It won the Eisner for Best New Series in 2016, and it is finished at 30 issues, so there is no waiting for the ending.
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Monstress (2015)
Published
Proof of how far comic art has moved since the newsstand days. Sana Takeda's painted pages, mixing Art Deco elegance with manga influence, carry Marjorie Liu's dark fantasy about Maika Halfwolf, a young woman with a monster living inside her, in a world still bleeding from a war.
Monstress won five Eisners in 2018, including Best Continuing Series, and Liu shared Best Writer that year. Be ready for dense worldbuilding that rewards reading a whole volume in one sitting rather than an issue at a time.
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Something Is Killing the Children (2019)
Published
If horror is what pulls you back, start here. James Tynion IV and Werther Dell'Edera send Erica Slaughter, a monster hunter in a bandana, into a small town where children keep disappearing, and the hunt opens into a much bigger mythology about the secret order she works for.
Tynion first pictured it as a five-issue miniseries; it became an ongoing series and shared the Eisner for Best Continuing Series in 2022. The run is long now, but the early collections stand on their own.
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The Department of Truth (2020)
Published
The most modern-feeling book here, and the one furthest from capes. James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds launched it at Image in September 2020: an FBI agent who studies conspiracy theories is recruited by a secret agency that polices them, in a world where belief can reshape reality. The first issue opens in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot.
Simmonds' painted, smeared artwork makes every page feel unstable. It is a good choice for a returning reader who wants comics to feel like something new rather than a trip back.
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