Faultlines #4

The fourth chapter of DC/Vertigo's six-part Faultlines miniseries arrives with a cover that immediately unsettles — a figure's face split between shadow and eerie red-lit clarity, streaked with dripping crimson tendrils, while a small-town street scene and a "Welcome to Placer Bend, Calif." sign bleed through the composition like a fractured memory. Bill Koeb's painted cover work layers dread and intimacy in equal measure, making the California Sierra foothills setting feel both familiar and deeply wrong. With Lee Marrs writing and coloring and the story titled "Blood Kisses," this mature-readers series clearly has no interest in pulling its punches at the halfway point.