Batman: Dark Detective #3

The cover of Batman: Dark Detective #3 pulls the eye in three directions at once — Batman looming watchfully in the shadows at left, a romantic near-embrace between a suited man and a blonde woman at center, and a grotesquely disfigured face snarling from the foreground below, accompanied by the blunt warning "A Time to Die!" Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin deliver a composition that balances tenderness and menace with real visual confidence. With Steve Englehart writing and Rogers and Austin reunited on art, this 2005 miniseries clearly has something compelling to say about love, identity, and whatever lurks beneath the surface.