Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children #4

Piranha Press's Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children was DC's mature-readers imprint doing some of its most quietly unsettling work in 1989, and Volume 4 has that sensibility written all over its cover. Dan Sweetman's fine-line illustration depicts a solitary, heavyset figure slumped in an armchair beside a floor lamp, a small side table bearing a plate of food and a glass nearby — an image of mundane isolation rendered in warm sepia tones that feels oddly melancholic. With Dave Louapre writing and Sweetman on both pencils and inks, this issue — housing a tale cheekily subtitled "A Happy Story" — promises the kind of deadpan, bittersweet storytelling that made this series a genuinely distinctive corner of late-'80s alternative comics.