Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison Omnibus

Rachel Pollack followed Grant Morrison on Doom Patrol in 1993 and pushed the book somewhere DC had never gone, with a transgender lead and stories about bodies, identity and shame. Pollack was the first openly transgender writer at a major American publisher, and Coagula, a trans woman with powers gained from a sex worker, is the first trans superhero in mainstream comics. The run was largely dismissed at the time and has been reassessed completely since; this is its first collected edition.

John Byrne relaunched Doom Patrol in 2004 with a full reboot, wiping the continuity Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack had built and starting from the original team. The JLA issues are where Byrne reintroduces the team, and the reboot itself is a genuine curiosity: DC let a creator delete two celebrated runs and then quietly restored them a few years later. Byrne's version plays the concept straight as science fiction, which is the version the character had before 1989.

Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark relaunched Doom Patrol in 2009, returning the team to superheroics without losing the strangeness the book is known for. Giffen had written the team before and knew the balance: Robotman gets the jokes, Negative Man gets the horror, and Rita Farr gets the dignity. The Metal Men back-up strip that ran with it is also here, and it is some of the most purely fun material DC published that year.

Doom Patrol by Gerard Way and Nick Derington: The Deluxe Edition collects the Young Animal relaunch, which opened with a sentient gyro and got stranger from there. Way writes the Doom Patrol as absurdist comedy with real feeling underneath, and Nick Derington's clean, poppy artwork makes the strangeness readable.

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Omnibus collects the original run by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani, in which a group of accident survivors nobody wants are assembled by a man in a wheelchair, months before the X-Men did the same thing. It also ends with the team dying, which nobody did in 1968.

A superhero built out of a bodybuilding advert investigates the end of the world while a rock star overdoses in a phone box and narrates his own childhood. Morrison and Quitely made their first book together an argument that superhero comics are worth defending, and it is still the strangest thing either of them has done.

PRH presents this as Grant Morrison's bold New 52 reimagining of Superman. The run starts from a more raw, early-career Man of Steel and builds toward stranger, larger threats without losing the idea of Superman as a social and moral force. This is the compact shelf for Morrison's New 52 Superman: part origin energy, part cosmic experiment, part statement about what Superman means when the myth is rebuilt from the street upward.

Grant Morrison and Mark Millar wrote The Flash together in the late nineties, immediately after Mark Waid, with Wally West already established as the fastest man alive. The Human Race is the standout: an alien gambler challenges the Flash to a race across the universe with Earth as the stake, and Morrison writes it as pure high concept. The Black Flash, death itself, running to catch up, is the other lasting idea, and DC has used it ever since.

Batman by Grant Morrison, collected complete as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Vol. 1 opens Morrison's Batman saga with Batman & Son, The Black Glove and Batman R.I.P. It introduces Damian Wayne, pushes Bruce Wayne through psychological pressure and starts the larger mystery that reshapes the Dark Knight across three omnibus volumes. Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Vol. 2 follows the saga after Batman R.I.P., with Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne operating as Batman and Robin while Bruce Wayne fights his way back through time. It collects the middle movement of Morrison's run, where legacy and identity become the main engine of the story. Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus Vol. 3 closes Morrison's Batman project with Batman Incorporated. Bruce Wayne turns Batman into a global network, drawing allies around the world into the fight against Leviathan and pushing the symbol far beyond Gotham.

Grant Morrison took over X-Men in 2001 and rebuilt it as science fiction about a species: the school opened to hundreds of students, mutants became a culture with fashion and drugs, and the costumes went black. Morrison's premise is that mutants are winning demographically and nobody has noticed, which reframes the whole franchise. Genosha's destruction in the first issue kills sixteen million people and the book never lets you forget it. Frank Quitely, Igor Kordey and Chris Bachalo draw it, and every X-Men run since has been either extending this or reacting against it.

Grant Morrison spent seven years on Batman treating every story ever published as canon, including the ones nobody wanted to remember, and then built a single argument out of all of it. Morrison's premise is that a man who has survived everything published since 1939 would have to be extraordinary, and Batman R.I.P. is the stress test. Damian arrives here as an insufferable ten-year-old assassin and leaves as one of DC's most valuable characters. Everything in the Bat-books for the next decade starts in this volume.

The middle third of Morrison's run is the part where Bruce Wayne is not in it: presumed dead, travelling backwards through history while Dick Grayson wears the cowl. Dick and Damian invert the classic dynamic, a light Batman and a violent Robin, and it is the most purely enjoyable stretch of the run. Frank Quitely draws the opening. Putting the two series in reading order is the reason to own this: published separately, the two halves kept explaining each other out of sequence.

This omnibus gathers the twenty-first century Phoenix stories: every attempt Marvel has made to bring Jean Grey back, and the event that used the Force as a weapon against the Avengers. Grant Morrison's Here Comes Tomorrow, Avengers vs. X-Men and Phoenix Resurrection in one volume is a genuinely useful pairing: the first imagines a future without her, the second turns five X-Men into gods, and the third finally brings the original Jean back after fourteen years. It is the complete modern argument about the character.

The final third of Morrison's Batman is Batman Incorporated: Bruce Wayne going public as the franchise's financier and recruiting a Batman for every country. The idea, that Batman's real superpower is money and organisation, is the most modern thing anyone has done with the character. It also ends with Damian's death, which Morrison had been building toward since the first volume and which DC did not undo for years. This is the payoff of the whole seven-year argument.