100% #3

The third chapter of Paul Pope's five-part Vertigo series arrives with a cover layered like a collage of lives intersecting — a muscular boxer in fighting stance dominates the foreground, while fragments of other figures and scenes press in around him, including a cross-section anatomical image and what appears to be a comic strip panel featuring a character named "Omni Bellrose." Pope's distinctive ink work renders everything in cool blue-grey tones, giving the whole composition the feel of a city that never quite sleeps. A mature-readers "graphic movie" hitting its midpoint, this 2002 issue promises the kind of densely human storytelling that made Vertigo's ambitious single-creator projects so compelling.