Sleeper: Season Two #9

Sean Phillips's stark red-and-black cover for Sleeper: Season Two #9 arranges four figures in a tense, fragmented portrait — a grinning man in a suit, a stone-faced man leveling a pistol, a watchful woman, and a masked figure looming ominously at the bottom. Ed Brubaker and Phillips were firing on all cylinders in 2005 with this Wildstorm espionage series, and the design here — clinical panels against a blood-red field — perfectly captures the paranoid atmosphere of undercover life gone complicated. "Déjà Vu All Over Again" promises exactly the kind of morally tangled thriller this creative team does so well.