Girls #17

Issue seventeen of the Luna Brothers' Girls arrives with one of the series' most quietly devastating covers: a battered figure, hands bound behind his back and a noose around his neck, head bowed against a smoldering crimson sky. Jonathan Luna's linework and coloring give the image a haunting stillness — the clenched fist, the blood-flecked face, the taut rope above all conspire to communicate enormous tension without a single word. It's the kind of cover that stops you cold in the back-issue bins, a testament to the brothers' ability to say everything through image alone.