The Exterminators #14

Vertigo's gritty pest-control series reaches issue #14 with a cover by Philip Bond that stops you cold — a man's face looms in extreme close-up, eye-to-eye with a small rodent lying on its back, claws raised, in an oddly tense standoff between exterminator and the exterminated. It's an unsettling, almost intimate image that captures the dark humor and unease at the heart of Simon Oliver's writing perfectly. "Lies of Our Fathers: Chapter Two" promises the kind of street-level, creepy-crawly storytelling that has made this mature-readers title one of Vertigo's more distinctive offerings of 2007.