Marvel 1602 #6

Scott McKowen's striking cover for this sixth installment of Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, and Richard Isanove's acclaimed reimagining sets a distinctly ominous mood: stone gargoyles perch atop ancient battlements draped in icicles, silhouetted against a sky thick with dark, billowing smoke and the distant glow of fire below. A flag flies in the turbulent background as birds scatter into the amber haze, the whole scene rendered in an almost woodcut-like style that feels perfectly at home in the Elizabethan world of 1602. With the series heading into its final stretch, this issue promises the kind of escalating tension its title — "Alarums and Excursions" — so evocatively suggests.