Shade, the Changing Man #56

Duncan Fegredo's painted cover for this February 1995 Vertigo entry is genuinely arresting — a figure fragmenting into scattered shards and confetti-like pieces, their hands clutching a patterned card covered in abstract eye-like shapes, the whole image saturated in warm flesh tones and bursts of pink and violet. The subtitle "Skinstamatic" and that unsettling sense of a self coming apart at the seams set a mood that feels perfectly at home in Peter Milligan's run on this title. With Buckingham, Lark, and Bryant handling interior art, issue #56 of Shade, the Changing Man is mature-readers Vertigo storytelling at its most viscerally imaginative.