Grant Morrison

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.

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.

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.

Final Crisis is Grant Morrison's 2008 event, in which Darkseid wins on page one and the rest of the story is about what happens to a universe after evil has already taken it. Morrison writes it as a deconstruction of superhero comics themselves: the Anti-Life Equation spreads as a meme, reality degrades into fragments, and the narrative structure breaks down with it. It is DC's most formally difficult event and its most rewarding on a reread, and Batman R.I.P. runs directly into it.

Grant Morrison relaunched the Justice League in 1997 with the original seven members and a simple thesis: they are gods, and the stories should be that size. Morrison writes each arc as an escalation that should be impossible to top and then tops it: angels, an invading White Martian fleet, and a villain who has already won by page one. Earth 2 with Quitely is the standout, a world where evil always wins, and the League cannot fix it. It is the template for every League run since.

Batman: Arkham Asylum The Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's painted graphic novel, one of the strangest and best-selling Batman books ever published. On April Fool's Day the inmates take the asylum and demand Batman walk in alone; interleaved with that night is the diary of Amadeus Arkham, the psychologist who built the place after his mother's death. McKean's mixed-media artwork, paint, photography and collage, makes it unlike any other Batman comic.

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.

Superman is dying, and instead of fighting it he spends the time left settling his affairs: telling Lois the truth, curing cancer, and answering the one question his father never got to ask. All-Star Superman is the argument that the character works best when he has nothing left to prove.

JLA: Earth 2 Deluxe Edition collects Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's graphic novel, in which the Justice League crosses into an antimatter universe where their evil counterparts have already won, and discovers that on that Earth good is structurally guaranteed to lose.

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.

The Invisibles Omnibus collects Grant Morrison's entire countercultural conspiracy epic in one volume: a cell of anarchist agents fighting a secret war against the forces that manufacture consensus reality. Magic, time travel, pop philosophy and 1990s paranoia, running for nearly sixty issues and reportedly a direct influence on The Matrix.

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.

52 Omnibus follows DC's weekly year after Infinite Crisis, when Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are absent from the centre of the universe. Booster Gold, Renee Montoya, Black Adam, The Question, Steel and Ralph Dibny carry a rotating ensemble story about a world trying to function without its usual icons.

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.

Grant Morrison's Animal Man is the 1988 run that made Buddy Baker famous and ends with the character meeting his own writer. The final issue, in which Buddy sits down with Morrison and asks why his family was killed, is one of the most discussed comics ever published. The run is also genuinely angry about animal cruelty, which almost no superhero book has attempted before or since.

Grant Morrison took over Doom Patrol in 1989, a cancelled team book about disfigured heroes, and turned it into the strangest thing DC has ever published under its own name. This is the run that launched Morrison's career: the Brotherhood of Dada, Danny the Street, Flex Mentallo and Crazy Jane, whose sixty-four personalities each have a different power. It is surrealism played completely straight, and it is also the direct origin of Vertigo as an imprint.

The second Johns omnibus contains Blackest Night, the event in which every dead character in the DC Universe returns wearing a black power ring. Blackest Night works because it is built on grief rather than spectacle: the risen dead are people the heroes failed to save, and they know exactly what to say. Ivan Reis draws the whole thing. It was DC's best-selling event of its decade and it reads far better collected than it did month to month.

DC One Million Omnibus collects Grant Morrison's crossover in which the Justice League of the 853rd century invites the present-day heroes to the future, and every DC title that month jumped a million issues ahead. It is Morrison at their most gleefully inventive: a Superman living inside the sun, a Batman descended from Bruce Wayne's line, and Vandal Savage still alive and still furious.

The Green Lantern by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp Omnibus collects the run that treated the Corps as an interstellar police procedural: Hal Jordan works cases across the galaxy, each issue a self-contained piece of cosmic weirdness, drawn by Liam Sharp in dense painted detail.

Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison Omnibus collects the most structurally ambitious thing Morrison ever attempted at DC: seven separate four-issue miniseries about seven unconnected heroes, bookended by two specials, which together tell one story none of the protagonists ever realise they are in. Shining Knight, Zatanna, Klarion, Guardian, Mister Miracle, Bulleteer and Frankenstein.

The epic mythology of the Phoenix in a single, uncanny Omnibus! The classic Dark Phoenix Saga was just the start: The cosmic firebird's fate remained intertwined with that of Jean Grey through her cycle of life, death and rebirth - and even took a few other hosts along the way! This volume collects the biggest Phoenix stories of the 21st century - from the epic future of "Here Comes Tomorrow" to the seismic war between the Avengers and the X-Men, plus the blockbuster returns that show you can never keep Jean Grey down for long!