Vermillion #5

Part five of "Starlight Drive" arrives with a genuinely unsettling image: a figure in boots and jeans dangles upside-down from a metal beam over a crumbling, illuminated void, arms reaching helplessly toward the drop below. Mike Kaluta's cover art frames the scene with an almost architectural eeriness, the ornate border at the bottom adding a strange elegance to what is otherwise a moment of pure precariousness. DC's Helix imprint continues to deliver this kind of beautifully off-kilter tension, with Lucius Shepard's writing and Al Davison's interior art keeping Vermillion one of 1997's more intriguing reads.