Preacher #44

Glenn Fabry's cover for Preacher #44 is a genuinely unsettling piece of work — a severe, goggles-wearing figure in a military cap and half-open uniform looms over a bound, prone captive, dangling what appears to be a multi-tailed whip or flail with menacing calm, a pair of handcuffs resting nearby. The warm red and ochre background amplifies the tension radiating from the scene without a single word of dialogue needed. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's "Custer's Law" promises the kind of morally complicated, hard-edged storytelling this Vertigo series delivered throughout 1998.