All throughout April, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the quarantine. It’ll be a crowdsourced list of recommended reading from writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s selection comes from writer Craig Hurd-McKenney…enjoy!

Much like this current moment, DOOM PATROL OMNIBUS by Grant Morrison & Richard Case starts in the darkest of places. Cliff Steele, a brain trapped in a robot body, has checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after too many losses and tragedies in his superheroic life. He’s watched as multiple colleagues have been mowed down around him, and he has broken. The losses might seem to come with the territory, given the name of the team. But Morrison & Case don’t let Cliff idle in sadness and pain; the weird wonder of the world awaits him and his new colleagues — colleagues that include a sentient, transgender street named Danny (yes, you read that right) and a man with the power of muscle mystery (you also read that right). They weave a wonderful tale over 50ish issues and a special: a tale of recovery, of imagination, and imagination corrupted into impending darkness. The series culminates in one of the most hopeful, single finest issues in comics ever created (Doom Patrol #63). “There is another world. There is a better world. Well...there must be.” I cry every time I read it. I love it so much. I hope you will, too. -Craig Hurd-McKenney

In addition to writing for Fantagraphics, MTV and other publications, The Brontës: Infernal Angria (May 27, 2020), writer Craig Hurd-McKenney is also the publisher of Headless Shakespeare Press. In 2000, HSP began as an outlet for McKenney’s personal zines, mini-comics, anthologies, comics, and graphic novels, and it has since become a hub for inclusive queer comics, with an eye towards representation in content and/or creator credits.

Doom Patrol Omnibus
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artists: Richard Case and Doug Braithwaite
Inkers: Scott Hanna, Carlos Garzon, and John Nyberg
Colorists: Daniel Vozzo and Michaele Wolfman
Letterer: John Workman
Publisher: DC Comics
Originally conceived in the 1960s by the visionary team of writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, the Doom Patrol was reborn a generation later through Grant Morrison's singular imagination. Though they are super-powered beings, and though their foes are bent on world domination, convention ends there. Shunned as freaks and outcasts, and tempered by loss and insanity, this band of misfits faces threats so mystifying in nature and so corrupted in motive that reality itself threatens to fall apart around them-but it's still all in a day's work for the Doom Patrol.

Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!