Shade, the Changing Man #51

Sean Phillips's painted cover for issue #51 sets a striking psychedelic tone — Shade reels backward in his signature M-Vest, its bold black-and-white op-art circles echoing the swirling teal-and-green pattern that engulfs the background, while a golden, grimacing masked face lurks along the left edge. The subtitle "Mad Mod Poet God" promises the kind of boundary-dissolving strangeness that has defined Peter Milligan and Sean Phillips's run on this DC Vertigo series. "The Morning of the Masks" sounds like exactly the sort of identity-warping chapter that fans of this mature-readers title will want in their hands.