Kill or Be Killed #18

The penultimate chapter of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's crime noir series arrives with a cover that stops you cold: the masked vigilante — blood-spattered hoodie, red balaclava pulled tight — sprawls across the frame in a disorienting top-down angle, a pump-action shotgun lying nearby and his outstretched hands suggesting collapse or desperate reach. Elizabeth Breitweiser's stark red-and-white palette gives Sean Phillips's painted composition an almost operatic weight, the smeared crimson streaks amplifying the sense that things have gone badly wrong. At issue eighteen, Kill or Be Killed is deep in its endgame, and this cover makes clear the cost of that journey.