2000 AD #523

Prog 523 of 2000 AD (23 May 1987) announces itself boldly with the tagline "Cruelty Is Only Skin Deep!" — and Kevin O'Neill's cover makes good on that promise, rendering a grotesquely muscular, pustule-covered creature clutching a dripping, many-fingered appendage while a jagged, spiked star-form erupts behind it, all tied to the Torquemada: God strip. O'Neill's viscerally detailed linework gives the monster a queasy, textured physicality that's genuinely hard to look away from. Inside, T. B. Grover and B. Kitson continue "Hour of the Wolf" with Part 4: Enter The Wolf!, making this a fine snapshot of 2000 AD at its most fearlessly weird.