Fatale #23

Sean Phillips's cover for Fatale #23 is genuinely arresting: a woman's face rendered in stark black-and-white seems to crack and crumble apart, its fractured surface dissolving into a vivid cosmic nebula of deep reds and brilliant starlight behind her. The collision of monochromatic illustration against that swirling, full-color universe creates an unsettling, beautiful tension that captures everything Brubaker and Phillips's noir-horror series does so well. If you've been following this Image title through 2014, this penultimate stretch of the series is not one to miss.