Automatic Kafka #2

Ashley Wood's painted cover for this second issue of Automatic Kafka is quietly unsettling — a ghostly, doll-like face marked with the number 28 dominates the lower half in murky greens and golds, while a delicate red-line sketch of a roller coaster structure floats against stark white above it. The contrast between that dreamlike architectural drawing and the eerie luminous figure below gives the whole thing an atmosphere that sits somewhere between carnival unease and something much darker. Joe Casey and Wood's mature-readers superhero series was clearly staking out its own strange territory in 2002, and this cover makes that ambition immediately felt.