Paradise X #7

Issue seven of Marvel's ambitious Paradise X series delivers one of its most striking covers yet, with Alex Ross painting a battered Punisher — skull emblem front and center, twin pistols raised — staring upward through a cascade of blood-red drip lines. Looming above him in the crimson background are armored, skull-faced figures that give the whole image an apocalyptic, almost ritualistic weight. With Jim Krueger and Alex Ross crafting the story and Doug Braithwaite and Bill Reinhold on interior art, this 2003 installment channels the dark grandeur that makes the Earth X trilogy so compelling.