The Punisher #5

Part of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's celebrated Marvel Knights run, issue #5 — "No Limits" — announces itself with a Tim Bradstreet cover that puts Frank Castle front and center: scarred, sunglassed, and bearing down with a pistol in a grim industrial warehouse bathed in orange light, the skull emblem looming large behind him. It's a study in cold menace, Bradstreet's photorealistic rendering making Castle feel less like a superhero and more like an inevitable force of nature. Inked by Bradstreet himself, the cover sets a fittingly uncompromising tone for one of 2001's most unsparing takes on Marvel's one-man war on crime.