I’m sure I’ll think of examples later1, but reading Chip Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 4: Dark Prisons, I feel certain there’s a genre of collections like this — extra-long and leading into and out of the event crossover of the day. Those are great; the real continuity-tied, “I know this is happening between these issues” kind of book that signaled, way back when, collections arriving as viable of a way to follow the DC Universe as their floppy counterparts.
My general enjoyment aside, Dark Prisons' rise and fall demonstrates the vagaries of shared-universe living. “Dark Prisons” proper, largely drawn by Jorge Jimenez, is a big inflection point for Zdarksky’s Batman run, one that for me went a long way toward redeeming Zdarsky’s run and also resetting some of Batman’s status quo in delightfully surprising manner. The Absolute Power tie-in issues, however, drawn less effectively by Mike Hawthorne, are just action filler, with far less plot than pages. And so it is; like many writers, when doing his own thing Zdarsky shines, and when pulled into others' stories, not so much.
