Royal City #9

Jeff Lemire's Royal City continues its quietly powerful run with issue #9, and this cover — a young man in a smiley-face tee standing alone amid the heavy industrial machinery of what looks like a factory floor — captures the series' signature mood perfectly: small, human figures set against spaces that feel too large and too quiet. Lemire's loose, expressive linework gives the warehouse setting a melancholy weight, all overhead hooks and grimy windows framing a kid who looks like he's figuring something out. It's the kind of understated, emotionally loaded image that has made Royal City one of Image's most compelling reads of 2018.