Red Hood and the Outlaws #21

The cover says it all: the Penguin presses a gun barrel to his own lips with chilling calm while Red Hood looms opposite him, smoke curling between two men who clearly have very different ideas about who holds the power here. Trevor Hairsine's close-cropped composition — faces nearly nose-to-nose against a deep crimson background — makes the tagline "And that was the Penguin's first mistake…" feel genuinely loaded with tension. Scott Lobdell, Dexter Soy, and Veronica Gandini bring Gotham's criminal underworld to a knife's edge in "Gotham Hold 'Em," and this issue promises the kind of street-level showdown that makes Red Hood and the Outlaws such a compelling corner of the DC Universe.