Avengers: The Children's Crusade #7

With two issues left in this nine-part limited series, issue #7 raises the stakes considerably — Jim Cheung's cover pencils (inked by Riccardo Federici) place a composed, cape-billowing Scarlet Witch front and center while the armored Doctor Doom looms ominously behind her, the two figures framed against a fiery, ember-strewn battlefield littered with fallen bodies. The pairing of Wanda and Doom radiates an uneasy tension that makes the cover hard to look away from. Allan Heinberg and Cheung's ambitious 2011 series continues to deliver, and this penultimate stretch promises the kind of convergence that the whole crusade has been building toward.