The Dreaming #7

Dave McKean's haunting photographic cover for this 1996 DC/Vertigo title perfectly sets the mood for "The Lost Boy, Part Four" — two ghostly figures face each other across a threshold, their translucent forms overlapping in a dreamlike double exposure that seems to dissolve the boundary between presence and absence. An arched architectural space, ethereal and just barely legible beneath the layered imagery, gives the whole composition a sense of liminal, half-remembered place. With Peter Hogan writing and Steve Parkhouse and Dick Giordano handling interior art, this is Vertigo atmosphere at its most quietly unsettling.