Paradigm #5

The cover of Paradigm #5 splits its design between two striking halves: a moody watercolor sky filled with silhouetted birds in flight, and a close-up of a bespectacled young man with tousled blond hair, his expression tense and watchful against a backdrop of handwritten text. Jeremy Haun's cover art gives the whole thing an unsettling, literary atmosphere — part journal, part waking nightmare. With a story titled "Friday: Laugh Tracks and Visitations," this 2003 Image series is clearly doing something thoughtfully off-kilter with its storytelling.