The Nice House on the Lake #4

The fourth chapter of James Tynion IV's unsettling DC Black Label series delivers one of 2021's most quietly haunting cover images: a young man in a floral shirt reclines in an inflatable pool ring, drink in hand, completely at ease amid a landscape of rubble, flooding, and open flame. Álvaro Martínez Bueno renders that collision of casual comfort and apocalyptic destruction with a calm, painterly precision that makes the image all the more unnerving. Jordie Bellaire's warm, fire-lit palette ties it all together into something that feels less like chaos and more like a very strange kind of paradise.