Hard Time #1

DC Focus launched some genuinely bold new voices in 2004, and Hard Time #1 — "50 to Life" — arrives with a cover that immediately signals something unsettling and original. Tomer Hanuka's artwork depicts a young man in an orange prison jumpsuit, shackled and wide-eyed, seemingly suspended or hurled through a sickly yellow-green cell, while a ghostly red-haired figure hovers nearby and disembodied hands reach in from the edges of the frame. Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes, and Brian Hurtt bring this story of incarceration and apparent supernatural unease to life in a series that wastes no time establishing its deeply strange, charged atmosphere.