Superman: Last Son of Earth #1

This DC Elseworlds two-parter from 2000 flips Superman's origin on its head, and Doug Wheatley's cover art immediately signals something wonderfully different. A young boy in a yellow-and-blue spacesuit stands alone on an alien world's cracked desert terrain, with Earth itself glowing in the starfield behind him, while two imposing alien figures — a stern, large-headed being and a golden-helmed companion — loom large overhead alongside exotic extraterrestrial architecture and spacecraft. Steve Gerber's premise comes through vividly in that single image: this is a Clark Kent who grew up among the stars rather than the Kansas plains, and the quiet scale of the cover makes it genuinely hard to look away.