Fables #3

From its earliest issues, Bill Willingham's Vertigo series was pairing dark fairy-tale sensibility with genuinely unsettling imagery — and this September 2002 cover by James Jean is a striking example. A gaunt, elderly woman in black bends to pour tea from a blue kettle, her elaborate lace hair-piece billowing overhead, while a pig's head, teacups, and strange, colorful creature-like forms crowd the floor around her feet. The dreamlike surrealism sets a quietly eerie mood that feels entirely at home in Fables' world, where nothing in a storybook is quite as cozy as it seems.