Northlanders #26

The sixth chapter of "The Plague Widow" arc arrives in this 2010 Vertigo entry in Brian Wood and Leandro Fernández's Viking-era series, and Massimo Carnevale's cover makes the tone unmistakably grim — three decayed, plague-ravaged heads loom in the foreground, dusted with snow, while a medieval church steeple rises against a sickly yellow sky patrolled by dark birds. It's a haunting image that captures the slow, suffocating grip of pestilence on a community already hardened by a brutal northern winter. With two chapters still to come, "The Descent" promises the arc is heading somewhere even darker.