Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? The Deluxe Edition

In 1992 DC killed Superman and the story made the evening news. Thirty years later this edition collects it as a single book. Doomsday is the rare villain who works precisely because he has no personality — no motive, no dialogue, just forward motion — and the escalating panel counts across the final issues are one of the smartest formal tricks in mainstream comics. Whatever you think of the stunt, it is the best-selling comic story ever published.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely wrote All Star Superman outside continuity in 2005, with a single premise: Superman is dying and has twelve labours left. Morrison treats every era of the character as true at once — the Silver Age absurdities, the Golden Age social crusader, the modern icon — and Quitely draws him as physically calm in a way nobody else manages. Issue #10 is widely considered the best single Superman comic ever published. It requires no prior reading at all.

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.

Injustice began as a tie-in to the fighting game and became one of DC's longest-running alternate universes, built on a single irreversible act: the Joker tricks Superman into killing Lois Lane and their unborn child. Injustice works because it takes its premise seriously: the heroes who side with Superman have reasons, and the ones who oppose him lose. It is the most accessible DC alternate universe on the shelf, with no continuity required, and this omnibus replaces three years of scattered digital-first collections with a single volume.

Superman: Birthright The Deluxe Edition collects Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu's twelve-issue retelling of Superman's origin, the version that reframed Clark Kent as a young man travelling the world as a journalist before he ever puts on the suit. Waid's key idea — that Clark can see the living aura around every creature, and therefore cannot bear to let anything die — is the warmest explanation anyone has given for why Superman does what he does.

The work Kirby left Marvel to make. Four interlocking series about warring gods, free will and tyranny, built as a single story with a beginning and an end, and the book that brought Darkseid into the DC universe.

Superman: The Triangle Era, collected complete as a pack of 3 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 1 begins DC's 1990s weekly Superman machine, where Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Superman and Man of Steel function as one coordinated reading order. The numbered triangles turn the line into a continuous serial rather than separate titles. Jurgens, Ordway, Stern and Simonson build the dense ecosystem that leads toward Death of Superman and the most interconnected Superman publishing era. Second volume with the central arcs of the Triangle Era experiment: the time when editorial coordination between the four Superman titles was at its creative peak, with weekly crossover sagas and consequences that spanned months. The heart of an entire decade of the character's history, culminating in the run-up to the Death of Superman. Roger Stern, Dan Jurgens, and Louise Simonson write complementary threads that reward reading in publication order. The most ambitious Superman publishing experiment ever attempted. Superman: Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 3 keeps the 1990s Superman machine moving through linked weekly storytelling, where Clark's personal life, Metropolis, supporting cast and superhero threats all feed into one another. Dan Jurgens, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Jon Bogdanove and Tom Grummett make the line feel like a living city.

Superman/Batman ran for eighty-seven issues on a simple format: the two characters narrating the same events in alternating captions, each convinced the other is doing it wrong. The dual narration is the reason the book works — the reader sees both men misreading each other in real time. This second volume includes the Sons of the Father arc and the Annuals, which are self-contained stories by rotating creative teams and among the most enjoyable single issues DC published that decade.

Begun in black and white for a British anthology in 1982 and finished in colour for DC, V for Vendetta sets anarchy against fascism in a near-future Britain. Moore refuses to make his protagonist comfortable: V is a terrorist and the book never resolves that for the reader. David Lloyd stripped out sound effects, thought balloons and motion lines, leaving only what a camera would catch. The Guy Fawkes mask left the book and entered the street, which very few comics can claim.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took a set of discarded Charlton characters in 1986 and used them to ask what costumed power would actually do to a country. The nine-panel grid, the recurring symbols and the symmetry of chapter five make the structure part of the argument, and the prose sections are not optional — they carry a third of the story. Watchmen is the book almost every deconstruction since is answering, and the deluxe format restores John Higgins' colour choices that cheap paper flattened.

The Killing Joke was published in 1988 as a one-shot in which the Joker sets out to prove that one bad day is all it takes to break anyone. Bolland finishes his own art and the control is the point: the Joker is terrifying because the drawing never flinches. The recolouring is genuinely different from the 1988 version — flatter, colder, with the flashbacks in near-monochrome — and it is the reason this edition exists. It remains the most cited Joker story ever published.