Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children #13

Three weathered, melancholy clown faces crowd Dan Sweetman's cover for this thirteenth volume of Piranha Press's Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children — the central figure in full greasepaint and paper hat flanked by two others whose smiles carry more weariness than joy. Dave Louapre and Sweetman continue their "Cotton Candy Autopsy" saga here, and the cover's unsettling warmth — rendered in soft pencil against a yellow-orange wash — perfectly captures the series' signature blend of the tender and the strange. A mature-readers anthology that consistently rewards anyone drawn to storytelling that lives in the uncomfortable space between fairy tale and the everyday.