Minor Threats #4

The penultimate issue of Dark Horse's 2023 series brings a genuinely unsettling cover from Scott Hepburn: a towering, exposed-brained villain looms over a chaotic cluster of costumed figures trapped within the design of his own jacket — a striking visual that captures the series' sardonic take on superhero hierarchy. Neil Gaiman's cover quote ("It reminds me of Astro City, of Brat Pack...") speaks to how writers Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum have been threading something fresh through familiar genre fabric. With Ian Herring's sickly greens and deep magentas setting an appropriately off-kilter mood, "The Straight Line" looks like exactly the kind of chapter where things stop being funny and start getting complicated.