Legion of Super-Heroes #125

The cover of this March 2000 issue tells its story in three stark surveillance-panel frames — a "Legion Outpost Live" feed counting down its final seconds, showing first a structure crackling with electric blue lightning, then a figure consumed in a blinding golden explosion, and finally a third panel gone to static with the ominous words "End Transmission." It's a brilliantly tense design by cover penciler Olivier Coipel and inker Andy Lanning, capturing the feeling of watching something catastrophic and irreversible unfold in real time. Concluding the "Widening Rifts" arc with Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Angel Unzueta, and Jaime Mendoza at the helm, issue #125 feels like the kind of chapter that leaves the Legion's 30th-century world fundamentally changed.