Alias #12

David Mack's cover for Alias #12 is a quietly arresting collage of painted and sketched imagery — a pale, pensive face rendered in loose linework gazes out from a layered journal-like composition, surrounded by abstract figures, handwritten phrases like "you can't hold me in this" and "broken," and scraps of painted pages that give the whole thing a raw, emotionally charged intimacy. It's a striking visual tone-setter for part two of "Rebecca, Please Come Home," and a fine showcase for what made Marvel's MAX imprint feel genuinely different in 2002. Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's mature-readers series continues to earn its reputation as one of the more emotionally honest superhero comics of its era.