Aria #22

Michel Weyland's long-running Belgian fantasy series returns with Het Spoor van de Ratten, and the cover sets a wonderfully tense mood: Aria, curly-haired and armed with a dagger, navigates a small boat through a dark underground waterway, bats circling an iron-gated tunnel behind her and a skull-strewn skeleton visible among the rocks nearby. It's the kind of atmospheric scene — shadowy caverns, an alert heroine, and ominous signs of those who didn't make it through — that has kept readers coming back to this Dupuis series for over two decades by 2000.