Shade, the Changing Man #20

The cover of issue #20 promises something genuinely unsettling: Jamie Hewlett's artwork erupts into a dense, churning mass of grotesque mutated faces — wide staring eyes, gaping mouths, horns, and writhing tendrils all fused together in a riot of fleshy reds and golds. The tagline "Face to Face with the Stranger Within!" makes the theme unmistakably clear, suggesting Shade's identity is fracturing into something barely containable. Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo, and Mark Pennington's Shade, the Changing Man was never afraid to go to strange places, and this February 1992 entry looks like one of the series' more viscerally surreal chapters.