Hellblazer #130

Part two of Garth Ennis and John Higgins's "Son of Man" arc announces itself with a genuinely unsettling Glenn Fabry cover: a bruised, battered face fills the foreground in extreme close-up, one glassy eye staring outward, while a chaotic brawl unfolds in warm red tones in the background. The contrast between the eerie stillness of that damaged face and the violence behind it captures the brooding, morally complicated atmosphere that Vertigo's Hellblazer consistently delivered in 1998. If this is the tone at part two of five, the arc has plenty of darkness still ahead.