The Dreaming #54

From Vertigo's The Dreaming comes issue #54, dated November 2000, continuing "Exiles, Part Three" with writing by Caitlín R. Kiernan and art by Christian Højgaard. Dave McKean's cover is a genuinely unsettling painted image — a figure whose face seems to split and multiply, eyes and tongues displaced across a mask-like visage, hair swept dramatically upward, the whole thing hovering between portraiture and waking nightmare. It's the kind of cover that reminds you exactly why Vertigo's mature-readers line felt so distinct in 2000.