Sheriff of Babylon #4

By issue #4 of The Sheriff of Babylon, Tom King and Mitch Gerads's Vertigo series was already earning praise like the Graphic Policy pull-quote displayed right on John Paul Leon's cover: "Another fantastic depiction of violence as an aspect of business, rather than an atrocity of life." Leon's cover art is quietly arresting — a figure draped in black, face veiled and partially masked, aims a weapon directly at the viewer, while behind them a bustling Iraqi street scene unfolds in muted greens and reds, a mosque's dome rising against the chaos. It's a striking visual distillation of the series' unsettling world, and "The Dream and the Desert" sounds like exactly the kind of morally weighted chapter this creative team does so well.