Hard Looks #7

Andrew Vachss's Hard Looks has always channeled raw, unsettling emotion, and issue seven's cover by Warren Pleece makes that visceral impact immediate — two overlapping faces, one dark and one fair, are rendered in close-up with a single tear trailing down a cheek, the stark black-and-amber palette giving the image a bruised, urgent intensity. It's a quietly haunting composition that sets the mood perfectly for the interior story, "Stone Magic," scripted by Vachss alongside Gary Pleece. Dark Horse's 1993 anthology of Vachss adaptations consistently delivered gritty, literary crime fiction in comics form, and this installment looks like no exception.