Ascender #16

Dustin Nguyen's watercolor cover for Ascender #16 sets an expansive, chilling mood — a vast snow-swept landscape splits open in a jagged crevasse below a pale moon, while a winged, red-eyed dragon creature banks menacingly through a blood-dark sky above the ruins of some angular, half-buried structure. Jeff Lemire and Nguyen's sci-fi/fantasy series has always balanced breathtaking scale with quiet dread, and this penultimate image captures both in a single, wordless panorama. If you've been following the series, this issue looks like the kind of convergence point you won't want to skip.