2000 AD #287

Prog 287 of 2000 AD kicks off a brand-new serial — "Harry Twenty on the High Rock" — with a striking Alan Davis cover that sets the stakes immediately: a shirtless prisoner numbered "20" faces down armored guards against the looming, scarred face of what appears to be a brutal warden, all of it set in an orbital penitentiary one hundred miles above the Earth, with no hope of escape. Davis's linework gives the scene real menace, balancing the defiant figure of Harry against the massed authority surrounding him. If you were picking up 2000 AD on 23 October 1982, this cover alone would have made putting it back on the shelf feel impossible.