The Goddamned #4

R. M. Guéra's cover for this fourth installment of "Before the Flood" is a haunting piece of work — a bearded warrior grips a wrapped weapon in the foreground while grotesque armored figures carrying spears loom behind him, severed heads suspended on poles against a sky streaked with dripping blood. Jason Aaron and Guéra's brutal vision of the antediluvian world feels every bit as merciless as the biblical era it inhabits, with colorist Giulia Brusco bathing the scene in sickly blues and earthy golds that make the crimson all the more unsettling. "The Covenant of Noah" promises the kind of savage, theologically charged storytelling that has made this Image series one of 2016's most uncompromising reads.