New X-Men #42

Part of the sprawling 2007 "Endangered Species" crossover event (Chapter 12), this issue opens the "Children of X-Men" arc from writers Kyle and Yost. Skottie Young's cover art centers on a young green-skinned mutant boy in an X-Men t-shirt, seated in a waiting-room chair with a quietly unsettling smile — his spiky, plant-like hand resting casually while a figure in a suit watches from a doorway in the background, and something luminous and rocky looms at the left edge of the frame. It's a subtly eerie, character-focused image that promises personal, human-scale stakes amid the larger mutantkind-in-crisis storyline running through Marvel's line that month.