Iron Man #27

Few comic covers stop you cold quite like this one — Iron Man's armor-clad body plummeting face-first toward a spilled liquor bottle below, his red-and-gold suit scorched and contorted in a genuinely unsettling freefall. The stark white background gives the image nowhere to hide, making the falling bottle and its splashing contents feel as heavy as the armored figure tumbling above it. Cover pencils by Joe Quesada, inked by Tim Townsend, deliver a quietly devastating image that makes The Invincible Iron Man #27 one of the more visually arresting covers of 2000.