Jour J #9

Set in an alternate 1967 where the USSR has already been annihilated and a new nuclear threat looms over the United States, this ninth volume of Delcourt's Jour J series drops readers into a gripping piece of counterfactual Cold War tension. The cover — credited to Manchu and Fred Blanchard — is immediately arresting: a lone rider on horseback gallops urgently across a darkened plain while an enormous mushroom cloud blooms in fiery orange and gold against the night sky behind them, with a herd of horses thundering alongside. Writers Fred Duval and Jean-Pierre Pécau, with art by Bojan Kovačević, bring their signature alternate-history vision to "Apocalypse sur le Texas," promising the kind of taut, speculative drama that has made this series a standout in French comics.