Books of Magick: Life During Wartime #5

Frank Quitely's cover for this January 2005 Vertigo issue pulls no punches — a close, intimate image of a bespectacled man and a dark-haired woman locked in a moment of brutal tenderness, her face and hands drenched in vivid crimson blood. The raw emotional charge of that image sets the tone for Si Spencer and Dean Ormston's continuation of this dark, mature-readers chapter of the Books of Magick universe. Part five of "Life During Wartime" promises the kind of unflinching storytelling that made Vertigo's early 2000s output so compelling.