Outlaw Nation #13

Glenn Fabry's painted cover for this November 2001 Vertigo entry sets an unsettling spiritual tone — a kneeling young man clasps his hands in something between prayer and dread while a shouting figure looms over him, one hand pressed firmly to his head, against a backdrop of vivid stained-glass imagery featuring a luminous female figure. Writer Jamie Delano and artist Goran Parlov bring their mature-readers vision to "Desperado," and the cover's charged atmosphere of coercion and supplication makes it hard not to wonder what forces — human or otherwise — are closing in on this series' world of outlaws and outcasts.