New Gods #9

Against a hellish backdrop of churning red and flame, two massive, looming faces dominate the cover of New Gods #9 — one grimly stoic, the other wild-maned and fierce — while a lone, exhausted figure kneels battered in the foreground. The tag line "At What Price, Victory?" hangs over the scene with real weight, perfectly capturing the costly, mythic stakes that define Jack Kirby's Fourth World corner of the DC Universe. Keith Giffen's cover art for this July 1996 issue, with its oppressive scale and raw intensity, makes "The Lord of Destruction" a chapter that demands to be read.