Samoerai #11

The cover of this 2018 Dutch-language album from Daedalus delivers a quietly arresting image: a samurai's feet and drawn blade loom in the foreground while his face reflects, inverted, in a still bowl of water surrounded by lotus leaves and bamboo. That interplay of threat and stillness perfectly captures the tone promised by the title "De sabel en de lotus" — the sword and the lotus — with cover art by Frédéric Genêt showing real compositional confidence. Writer Jean-François Di Giorgio and artists Genêt and Cristina Mormile continue to make Samoerai one of the more visually distinctive samurai series in European comics.