Fantastic Four #556

Part three of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's "World's Greatest" arc delivers one of 2008's most unsettling cover images: the Thing crouching over two battered, fallen members of the Fantastic Four amid a vast field of skulls and bones, desperately pleading — "Cap, please! Don't kill us! Ya already done enough!" The scale of carnage surrounding them and the raw desperation on Ben Grimm's face make it impossible not to want to crack the cover and find out what brought Earth's most resilient hero to his knees. With Hitch's meticulous linework capturing every crack in the Thing's rocky hide and every torn thread of those blue uniforms, this issue promises the kind of high-stakes superhero drama this creative team does so well.