Excalibur #78

Kicking off "The Douglock Chronicles," this 1994 Marvel issue puts a striking, cybernetic hybrid figure front and center — bearing an X-Men emblem and a body that blends organic and mechanical elements in unsettling detail, as the cover copy teases: "You thought you'd never see him again — and you've never seen him before!" Nightcrawler recoils in shock at the left while a red-haired woman in a yellow-and-blue costume looks on with equal alarm at the right, both clearly shaken by whatever they're witnessing. Ken Lashley's pencils and Mark Pennington's inks give the whole scene a raw, dynamic energy that makes this opener to the Douglock storyline genuinely hard to put down.