East of West #9

A striking magenta-and-white cover by Nick Dragotta sets the mood for this January 2014 installment of Jonathan Hickman's alternate-history epic — a hulking, armored figure with an animal-like helmet rests amid a desolate landscape, radiating an eerie, monumental calm. The series' signature dread-soaked atmosphere is fully intact, and the cover's tagline — "This is the world. It's not the one we were supposed to have, but it's the one we made" — frames "A Kingdom of Riches" with the weight it deserves. With Dragotta's bold design sensibility and Frank Martin's limited but striking color palette, this is the kind of issue that makes East of West one of Image's most visually distinctive ongoing series of the era.