Sword of Azrael #5

The penultimate chapter of DC's six-issue limited series arrives with a cover that sets an unsettling, almost reverent tone — a tall, dark-clad figure in a wide-brimmed hat holds a cross-marked book aloft, bathed in piercing light, while a white-haired armored figure kneels or bows before him beneath the ominous declaration "Father Valley, Hallowed Be Thy Pain!" Nikola Čižmešija's cover work captures a charged confrontation between devotion and menace with striking compositional confidence. With Dan Watters writing and Marissa Louise's colors driving the atmosphere, this 2023 series has been a genuinely compelling corner of the DC universe, and issue five promises to push that tension to its limit.