Hard Looks #4

Andrew Vachss's Hard Looks brings gritty street-level tension to this fourth issue, with a cover by Paul Guinan and Tony Akins that sets an immediately charged mood. Front and center, a sharp-eyed young man named Tony — jacket bearing his name — stares out with cool menace, a knife in hand, flanked by a companion, while the background erupts into a brawl involving figures atop a battered green car, one wielding a bat overhead. It's the kind of cover that captures the raw, urban edge that made this Dark Horse series one of 1992's more distinctive crime comics.