Sweet Tooth #16

Three skulls — one bearing a pair of antlers — rest on a darkened forest floor while crows circle through the haze of a twilight tree line, setting an eerie, elegiac mood that feels entirely at home in Jeff Lemire's post-apocalyptic series. This is "Animal Armies Part 4," and the cover's cold blue palette and lurking shadows suggest the story has moved somewhere deeply unsettling. Lemire's raw, expressive linework paired with José Villarrubia's atmospheric coloring makes this 2011 Vertigo issue hard to put down before you've even opened the cover.