Sleeper: Season Two #6

Sean Phillips's cover for Sleeper: Season Two #6 says everything with a single charged image: a shaved-head man in a camouflage jacket embraces a dark-haired woman in a passionate kiss — while a knife gleams in his raised hand behind her back. It's a perfect visual shorthand for the moral tightrope Ed Brubaker's acclaimed spy-noir series walks, where intimacy and danger are practically the same thing. If you've been following this WildStorm mature-readers title through 2005, "Four-Sided Triangle" looks like exactly the kind of double-edged chapter the series does so well.