Alone #9

The ninth volume of Gazzotti and Vehlmann's Alone carries a quietly unsettling cover: a red-haired boy recoils in alarm as a hunched, yellow-jacketed figure — struck by an arrow and leaving a trail of blood droplets across the stark white ground — staggers nearby. That stark contrast of innocent cartoon style against genuinely grim imagery is exactly the tonal tightrope Alone walks so well. Before the Midnight Child promises another chapter of childhood survival pushed to its darkest, most compelling edges.