Hunter: The Age of Magic #4

Vertigo's Hunter: The Age of Magic #4 (December 2001) arrives at the fourth chapter of "The Lake of Fire" arc, subtitled "The City of the Dead" — and John Bolton's painted cover sets an appropriately eerie, otherworldly tone. Two figures, a young woman in diaphanous white and a bare-chested young man, drift together against a rocky, cavernous backdrop populated with strange aquatic and earthly creatures, their faces close in an ambiguous moment of tension or tenderness. Writer Dylan Horrocks and artist Richard Case continue their collaboration on this Vertigo gem, with the cover alone promising an atmosphere that sits beautifully at the intersection of magic, danger, and the uncanny.