Avengers #17

The "Day of the Doomsday Man!" banner sets the stakes high as this June 1999 issue of The Avengers delivers a cover by Jerry Ordway that plunges several heroes straight into the fight. A massive armored robot dominates the scene, while Wasp fires her bio-sting point-blank into its chest, a blonde hero strikes from below, Iron Man lies fallen in the rubble at its feet, and another Avenger is flung through the air against a backdrop of fiery orange devastation. Writer and artist Jerry Ordway, inked here by Al Gordon, brings an urgent, kinetic energy to "Cage of Freedom" that makes this team-versus-machine showdown genuinely hard to put down.