Northlanders #27

Penultimate chapters rarely carry this much weight — issue #27 of Brian Wood and Leandro Fernández's "The Plague Widow" arc arrives at its second-to-last chapter with Massimo Carnevale's haunting cover art doing full justice to the bleak tension. A weathered, wild-eyed old Viking figure crouches over a fallen, grimacing man in the snow, one gnarled hand raised as a wooden crucifix lies discarded nearby — a collision of brutal Viking reality and fragile faith rendered in Carnevale's signature painterly style. With only one issue remaining in this eight-part Vertigo arc, the penultimate installment promises a story pulled as tight as a bowstring.