Ascender #3

Dustin Nguyen's gorgeous watercolor cover for Ascender #3 sets a striking tone, placing a weathered man and a wide-eyed young girl in the foreground — she clutches what appears to be a glowing, ornately carved staff — while a massive green dragon with blazing red eyes looms open-jawed behind them against a swirling cosmic backdrop. The tension between the two small, road-worn figures and the colossal creature overhead gives the image a beautifully uneasy sense of scale. Jeff Lemire and Nguyen's sci-fi fantasy series continues to look like nothing else on the shelves in 2019.