Jacked #3

The cover of this third chapter in Eric Kripke's six-issue Vertigo series pulls no punches — a badly beaten man in a suit sprawls across a grimy alley floor, pills spilling from an orange prescription bottle beside his bloodied hand, while a boot descends toward him from above and a alarmed woman in the background reaches out on her phone. Glenn Fabry's cover art captures the series' gritty, street-level tension with unsettling precision, making "Chasing the Dragon" feel like exactly the kind of escalation you'd hope for at the midpoint of a mature-readers thriller. If the first two issues had you hooked on this story of performance-enhancement gone wrong, issue three looks ready to push things considerably further.