Punisher: Soviet #5

Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows's gritty MAX Comics series rolls into its penultimate chapter with a cover by Paolo Rivera that commands attention — a towering red-tinted silhouette of the skull-chested Punisher looms over the scene like a propaganda poster while a white-haired gunman mans a mounted weapon atop a blood-spattered Humvee, smoke billowing into the dark sky behind him. The stark Soviet-poster aesthetic perfectly frames the cold-blooded, geopolitical tension at the heart of this series. If you've been following Frank Castle's brutal collision with Russian ruthlessness, issue five — "A Sudden Sense of Liberty" — is not the place to look away.