Adventure Time: Banana Guard Academy #5

The penultimate issue of this six-part KaBOOM! miniseries arrives with one of the more delightfully unnerving covers of 2014 — the entire page is dominated by an enormous swirling face, its wide eyes each framing a different Banana Guard: one looking smug with arms crossed and a chocolate-drizzled cap, the other wide-eyed and alarmed while clutching a spear and a small skull-adorned medal. Cover artist Aimee Fleck turns the whole composition into a kind of hypnotic close-up that perfectly captures the absurd stakes of academy life in the Land of Ooo. With Dylan Haggerty and Kent Osborne writing and Mad Rupert on interior art, this series has been a charming deep-dive into the world of Candy Kingdom's finest (and most bewildered) defenders.