East of West #7

Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta's ambitious alternate-history series continues with "The Pilgrimage," and the cover alone sets a striking tone: rendered in a bold, monochromatic red, a massive serpentine or draconic creature coils and writhes across the upper half of the image, its scaled body filling the space with an unsettling sense of enormous scale. The stark design — giant creature looming above the oversized title treatment — captures the series' knack for merging the mythic with the apocalyptic. Frank Martin's limited palette gives the whole thing a raw, urgent feel that's become one of the visual signatures of this 2013 Image standout.