Terminal City #3

The third chapter of Dean Motter and Michael Lark's noir-tinged Vertigo series delivers a cover that immediately sets the tension: a figure rendered in cool blues dangles upside-down outside a window, pistol in hand, while an amber-hazed industrial cityscape — water towers, low rooftops, and what looks like fire — burns below. Mark Chiarello's cover art plays the warm and cold palette against each other to striking effect, with that dangling gunman framed by the window's grid like a man caught between two worlds. "Episode Three" of this nine-part saga promises the kind of stylish, street-level drama that made Terminal City one of 1996's more distinctive offerings from DC's mature-readers imprint.