Clue: Candlestick #3

Dash Shaw brings his distinctly offbeat sensibility to this third chapter of IDW's Clue: Candlestick, and the cover alone is a delightfully unsettling piece of work. Against a swirling, hypnotic fingerprint background — a perfect nod to mystery and forensics — several suspects crowd the composition: a woman in a floral dress clutching a magnifying glass and what appears to be a bloody weapon, a man in a bold purple jacket and checkered trousers holding a knife, and two more alarmed faces looming from above, while a golden candlestick hovers ominously to the left. Shaw's flat, idiosyncratic linework gives the whole scene a queasy tension that feels perfectly suited to a whodunit where nobody — and nothing — is quite what it seems.