Fatale #15

Sean Phillips's cover for Fatale #15 sets the mood perfectly: a dark-haired woman in white leans into the embrace of a man in an orange prison jumpsuit, the two of them framed — and separated from the world — by cold steel bars. The tension between intimacy and confinement is exactly the kind of noir atmosphere that has made this Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips series so compelling in 2013. "Prologue" promises another layer of the story's shadowy mythology, and this cover alone makes the issue hard to put back on the shelf.