The Witching #5

This December 2004 Vertigo title serves up a wonderfully unsettling Halloween tableau, with a wide-eyed blonde woman in gothic attire recoiling from an oversized, cartoon-like black cat licking her face amid a graveyard setting. A glowing jack-o'-lantern brimming with candy and worms anchors the foreground, while bats and spiderwebs complete the spooky atmosphere — all rendered in Tara McPherson's distinctively stylized, pop-art-inflected cover art. Jonathan Vankin and Mark Buckingham's mature-readers series has rarely looked this captivatingly strange.