Sam and Twitch #12

This 2000 Image Comics entry in the Spawn universe's street-level detective series brings "Witchcraft Part III" to an unsettling close-up on Ashley Wood's painted cover — a deeply shadowed face, half-obscured, with anxious hands raised near the mouth, cryptic symbols bleeding into the murky background. The mood is pure noir dread, the kind of atmosphere that suits Sam and Twitch's gritty corner of the Spawn mythos perfectly. With Brian Michael Bendis writing and Alberto Ponticelli on interior art, this is mature crime storytelling wrapped in some genuinely haunting painted imagery.