Shade, the Changing Man #48

Part four of "A Season in Hell" arrives in this June 1994 DC Vertigo entry, with a cover painted by Duncan Fegredo that sets an unsettling, almost absurdist tone: a grinning, pipe-smoking man in a suit looms over a dark-haired figure in a vivid patterned robe, feeding or prodding them in a deeply peculiar tableau, while a perfectly civilized tea service — teapot, cups, roses, and little cakes — sits arranged on the table below. The title "High Tea in Low Places" couldn't be more fitting for that collision of domestic propriety and creeping wrongness. With Peter Milligan writing and Philip Bond on interior art, this series has always had a gift for making the strange feel strangely intimate.