Joe the Barbarian #7

The penultimate chapter of Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy's eight-part Vertigo series arrives with a cover that crackles with momentum: Joe rides a massive armored warhorse — bristling with arrows and clearly battle-scarred — while beneath them, a tide of tiny skeletal warrior figures swarms across what looks like a mechanized battlefield. Murphy's linework is at its most kinetic here, balancing an impossibly large steed against Joe's scrappy, determined posture as he hauls on the reins against that burnt-orange sky. With only one issue left after this 2010 installment, "Labyrinth of the Lost" promises the kind of breathless escalation that makes this series so hard to put down.