Shade, the Changing Man #22

Two figures — one wild-haired and wide-eyed, the other dark-haired and recoiling — are swept up in a swirling chaos of grotesque, cartoonish creatures and alien machinery on Jamie Hewlett's wonderfully frenetic cover for this April 1992 installment of Peter Milligan's surrealist DC series. The word "METAMORPHOSIS!" blazes across the image in red, perfectly capturing the sense of reality coming apart at the seams around Shade and his companion. It's a visually inventive cover that signals exactly the kind of beautifully strange storytelling this mature-readers title consistently delivered.