Jonah Hex #20

Phil Noto's cover for this August 2007 issue stops you cold: Jonah Hex hangs upside down, battered and bloodied, while a pack of wild dogs closes in across a barren desert plain beneath a sky dotted with circling birds. It's a quietly devastating image — no bravado, just a scarred man at the mercy of the frontier's cruelest elements. Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with Noto handling full art duties inside, were delivering some of the sharpest Western storytelling DC had to offer that year.