The Programme #7

Peter Milligan's Cold War super-soldier series reaches its seventh chapter with a cover by C.P. Smith that hits like a propaganda poster turned nightmare — a massive Soviet hammer and sickle dominates the foreground while a group of grim, shadowy military figures looms out of the darkness behind it, rendered in an eerie palette of greens and blacks. The story is titled "The Stars and Stripes," a pointed contrast to all that Soviet iconography staring you down from the cover. Smith handles every visual element himself — pencils, inks, and colors — and the result is a brooding, atmospheric image that makes this WildStorm series feel as weighty as the ideological conflict it evokes.