Joe the Barbarian #5

The penultimate stretch of Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy's Vertigo limited series arrives with issue five of eight, and Sean Murphy's cover composition is genuinely striking — a towering, armored figure looms above a swirling vortex of spiraling energy, while a sword-bearing warrior on horseback rides through the chaos below, and a wide-eyed young boy (Joe himself) looks upward from the bottom of the frame, toy gun in hand, dwarfed by it all. The sense of scale between the three figures tells you everything about where Joe stands in this world — small, but clearly at the center of something enormous. Dave Stewart's restrained color palette keeps the whole image feeling grounded and eerie at once, making this one of the more visually cohesive covers in the run.