Ultimate Power #5

The midpoint of this nine-part crossover event arrives with a jolt, and Greg Land and Jay Leisten's cover captures the tension perfectly — Ultimate Thor, crackling with lightning in his blue-and-silver armor, is caught mid-struggle against a powerfully built dark-haired figure in a maroon costume who looms over him with a raised fist, a massive warship bearing down ominously in the background. The raw energy between these two combatants practically leaps off the page, with electricity arcing across the entire composition in a way that makes the stakes feel genuinely enormous. J. Michael Straczynski is at the helm of the writing, and with the series already at its halfway mark, this is a fine time to jump into one of 2007's most ambitious Marvel universe-colliding stories.