Metal Gear Solid #4

Ashley Wood's painterly cover for this fourth issue of IDW's official Konami adaptation cuts an immediately striking figure: a massively built soldier wielding an enormous multi-barreled minigun, rendered in Wood's signature loose, gestural style against a spare, pale background. The raw energy of that brushwork gives the armed figure a genuinely unsettling weight and presence. Written by Kris Oprisko with all interior artwork also by Wood, this 2004 series continues to bring the world of Metal Gear Solid's tactical espionage action to the comics page in a way that feels distinctly its own.