The Sandman Presents: Deadboy Detectives #3

Dave McKean's cover for this third chapter of the four-part miniseries is a quietly unsettling collage of inked faces and layered textures — two ghostly boy figures rendered in scratchy, expressive linework peer out from a warm amber circle, while a larger, looming adult presence crowds the composition, a pointed instrument held between them suggesting tension and unease. Published under Vertigo's mature-readers banner in 2001, the issue continues Ed Brubaker's "The Secret of Immortality" with interior art by Bryan Talbot and inks by Steve Leialoha. If you've been following this Sandman-universe mystery from the start, issue three is exactly the place where the atmosphere promises to deepen.