The Exterminators #5

Tony Moore's gritty Vertigo series reaches a milestone with issue five, and Philip Bond's cover sets the tone perfectly: a skeletal hand thrusts upward from a seething, writhing mass of cockroaches, clutching a semi-automatic pistol against a stark white background punctuated by ominous red splatters. It's a striking image that captures everything unsettling about this mature-readers title — the bugs, the violence, and something distinctly wrong crawling just beneath the surface. With Simon Oliver's writing and the "Bug Brothers: Conclusion" story wrapping up, this is a satisfying chapter in one of Vertigo's more bracingly dark series from 2006.