Napoleon #3

The third and concluding volume of this Dutch-language biographical series finds Napoleon at his most haunted — the cover, illustrated by Fabrizio Fiorentino, depicts a snow-swept battlefield where a lone figure in a greatcoat and bicorne hat strides forward against a backdrop of exhausted, frost-bitten soldiers fading into the blizzard. The palette of frozen grays and whites conveys a campaign in collapse, every detail — the bare black branches, the fallen feathers, the ghostly masses of troops — adding to the atmosphere of a empire unraveling in the cold. Writer Noël Simsolo and artist Fiorentino bring this 2019 series to a close with unmistakable visual power.