Fairest #20

Vertigo's Fairest #20 wraps up "The Return of the Maharaja" arc with a cover by Adam Hughes that is as unsettling as it is beautifully rendered — a robed woman clutching a quiver of arrows stands over a wounded, bloodied man while an enormous, disembodied eye dominates the foreground in deeply surreal fashion. The palette of warm ochres and creams gives the image an almost painterly, art-nouveau quality that makes the pooling blood and that singular staring eye all the more arresting. With Sean E. Williams writing and Stephen Sadowski among the artists, this sixth chapter of the storyline promises the kind of mature, fable-dark storytelling that made Fairest such a compelling corner of the Fables universe.