Batman #48

Part one of "The Best Man" arrives with a cover that's hard to look away from: the Joker, wild-eyed and snarling, smashes through a chess board and sends pieces flying in every direction — clutching a broken Batman chess piece in his fist. Mikel Janín's artwork crackles with kinetic menace, the scattered pawns and shattered king lending the whole image a charged, unsettling sense of a game being violently upended. Tom King and Janín make a compelling team, and this 2018 issue signals that something genuinely consequential is on the horizon for the Dark Knight.