Powers #5

Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Avon Oeming's Powers returns under Marvel's Icon imprint with a new format and more pages — and this fifth issue wastes no time setting a brooding, noir tone. Mike Avon Oeming's cover places a grim, leather-jacketed man hunched over a table with a glass, dwarfed by towering red-drenched silhouettes of costumed figures looming behind him — the contrast between the ordinary and the superhuman rendered in stark, moody blacks and deep crimson. It's the kind of image that captures exactly what Powers does best: grounding the world of capes in something rawer and more human.