Animal Man #40

Part of DC's 1991 "War of the Gods" crossover event, this issue places Animal Man in a genuinely unsettling predicament — Brian Bolland's cover shows the orange-and-blue-costumed Buddy Baker dwarfed and clutched in the enormous, ancient hand of a massive godlike being whose craggy, weathered face looms over him with an air of absolute power. The scale contrast is striking and a little unnerving, rendered with Bolland's characteristic precision and weight. With Tom Veitch writing and Steve Dillon on interior art, "Bear Claw Soup" promises the kind of grounded yet cosmically strange storytelling that made this era of Animal Man so distinctive.