Moonshadow #9

The cover of this ninth chapter of Epic Comics' celebrated "fairy tale for grown-ups" is a quietly haunting image: a young figure dressed as a marionette in a vivid red jester's costume sits cross-legged, strings visibly attached to his limbs, his expression pensive beneath a pointed red cap — while looming above, half-shrouded in shadow, is a large, dark figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Jon J. Muth's painterly artwork gives the whole composition a dreamlike, melancholy warmth that feels utterly singular for 1986 comics. J. M. DeMatteis and Muth's collaboration had already drawn praise from the New York Daily News — quoted right on the cover as "a spectral, literate tone-poem" — and issue #9, "Gloriously Crown'd," looks every bit worthy of that description.