Names of Magic #5

The five-issue Vertigo miniseries from Dylan Horrocks and Richard Case reaches its conclusion with "Chapter Five: Truth," and John Bolton's painterly cover sets an appropriately haunting tone. A bespectacled young boy stands arms-crossed amid a swirling, otherworldly landscape of rock, water, and enormous serpentine scales looming behind him — composed and defiant in the face of something vast and ancient. It's a quietly compelling final image for a mature-readers series that clearly had magic, and the weight of confronting it, at its heart.