Hellblazer #121

A television screen becomes a window into something deeply unsettling on Sean Phillips's cover for this opening chapter of "Up the Down Staircase" — a distressed, wide-eyed Constantine is visible inside the TV set while a shadowy, grinning figure looms behind him, and a hand in the foreground coolly holds a remote control. The composition cleverly plays with the idea of watching and being watched, giving Paul Jenkins and Warren Pleece's four-part story an immediately eerie, voyeuristic charge. If this first installment is any indication, Hellblazer's January 1998 entry is shaping up to be one of its more psychologically charged reads.