Black Orchid #19

Dave McKean's cover for this third chapter of "A Twisted Season" is hauntingly atmospheric — a close, dreamlike portrait of a woman's face rendered in deep blues and purples, her features partially obscured by golden spiral and vertical ornamental forms that lend the composition an almost ritualistic quality. The layered, painterly treatment feels perfectly suited to Black Orchid's world, where the boundaries between the living and the dreamed-of dead grow genuinely unsettling. With Dick Foreman writing and Rebecca Guay on interior art, issue #19 sits at the midpoint of a six-part arc that clearly has a lot on its mind.