5:45 A.M.

"5:45 A.M." consists of eight wordless, actionless panels, drawn in a realistic style, depicting aspects of an early morning scene in a small house. The first three panels show details of a messy kitchen and dining room, with dirty dishes, rags, and groceries strewn about and a coffeemaker that displays signs of recent use. The fourth panel moves to a bedroom with an unmade bed; a lamp missing its shade and an ashtray full of cigarette butts sit on the nightstand, and a long cord is wrapped around one of the bedposts. In the fifth panel, a porcelain lamp and a small display of family photos sit undisturbed on a polished wooden end table, with the arm of a sofa visible at the edge of the frame. In the sixth panel, all the hints of a disturbance in the previous images are realized: propped upright on the sofa is the body of an older woman killed by ligature strangulation, the victim of an apparent home invasion. In the final panels the focus returns again to the surrounding environment, displaying the living room and entryway and concluding with an exterior view of the house just before daybreak.

"5:45 A.M." was well received by critics. Chris Mautner, writing for Comic Book Resources, called it "one of the creepiest and most frightening things to run in Mome... Columbia offers glimpses into a rather disheveled and seemingly empty home early in the morning before coming upon the ugly punchline, and then finally pulling back and forcing us to completely re-evaluate what we've seen before."[1] Describing it as "more or less a tableaux nature morte", Copacetic Comics declared that it "(finally) lives up to the promise of [Columbia's] outsized rep" and "shows us that, yes, God is in the details."[2] Joshua Glenn in the Boston Globe characterized the story as a "wordless murder mystery",[3] while critic Sean T. Collins speculated that it drew inspiration from the BTK killings.[4]

The story was selected by editor Charles Burns to appear in the 2009 edition of The Best American Comics.

Canadian director Santiago Menghini included a shot-for-shot recreation of "5:45 A.M." in his 2014 short film Intruders, which also adapted a comic by Russian artist Uno Moralez.[5][6] Intruders was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival[7] and won the Best Directing award at Montreal's 2014 SPASM horror movie festival.[8]