Automatic Kafka #8

Ashley Wood's painterly cover for issue #8 of this WildStorm series is a quietly arresting image — two figures rendered in warm, layered washes of amber and red, their forms blending together in an intimate, almost dreamlike embrace. The loose, expressive brushwork is unmistakably Wood's own, signed in the lower right, and it captures the series' offbeat sensibility perfectly: superhero comics that feel nothing like superhero comics. Billed as "the only real SUPERHERO comic in the world," Automatic Kafka continued in 2003 to deliver Joe Casey and Ashley Wood's singular vision, and this penultimate issue looks every bit as intriguing as that promise suggests.