The Beef #5

The finale of "Tainted Love" arrives in unsettling style with this cover by Shaky Kane and John Roshell, which presents five supermarket meat trays — each shrink-wrapped and price-tagged at $3.99 — displaying fragmented pieces of a raw-red humanoid figure: a hand, a torso, a wide staring eye, and slabs of textured flesh. It's a darkly clever visual gag that packages the series' hero (or what's left of him) like a grocery-store special, commenting on consumerism and the meat industry with grim wit. Rounding out this 2018 Image run from writer-artist team Richard Starkings, Tyler Shainline, and the relentlessly inventive Shaky Kane, issue five promises a conclusion as provocative as its cover suggests.