John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead in America #4

Part of DC Black Label's Sandman Universe line, this fourth issue of John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead in America delivers a cover that says everything you need to know about the tone of this series. Constantine stands front and center, cigarette in hand and smoke curling upward, wearing a blood-soaked clerical stole patterned with American flag stripes — a quietly unsettling collision of the sacred and the profane set against a fiery, hellish sky and a silhouetted rural landscape. Aaron Campbell's painted cover work, colored beautifully by Jordie Bellaire, gives the whole image a brooding, cinematic weight that perfectly suits Si Spurrier's dark corner of the Sandman Universe.