Family Tree #11

The penultimate issue of Jeff Lemire's haunting series arrives with a cover by Phil Hester and Eric Gapstur that stops you cold: a solitary, bare-branched tree consumed by fire, its smoke billowing upward into the shape of a massive, disintegrating human head against a fiery orange sky. It's a striking, elegiac image — natural and human intertwined, literally burning together — that captures everything unsettling and heartfelt about this series in a single frame. With the finale drawing near in 2021, this is a compelling moment to be reading Family Tree.