Happy! #4

The four-issue miniseries from Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson reaches its dark holiday conclusion, and Robertson's cover makes the stakes viscerally clear: a young girl in a Christmas-print dress, bound to a wooden chair with glowing string lights and gagged with red tape, her wide eyes staring directly at the viewer. It's a genuinely unsettling image that captures everything Happy! does so well — wrapping genuine menace in the trappings of seasonal cheer. A sharp, purposeful ending to one of Image's more daring 2013 offerings.