Green Lantern #74

Three faces stare out from a triptych cover with unsettling intensity — a dark-haired woman, Kyle Rayner in his Green Lantern mask, and John Stewart — all set against a wall of rising flame and the stark question: "Who Will Die?" Writer Ron Marz and artist Darryl Banks (with inks by Romeo Tanghal) were clearly not pulling punches in June 1996, and that provocative tagline makes this issue of "Stand" hard to set down before you've cracked it open. The cover's cool blues clashing against the orange inferno below gives the whole thing a charged, ominous energy that perfectly captures mid-'90s DC storytelling at its most gripping.