Ultimate Six #5

Spider-Man looks utterly overwhelmed on John Cassaday's striking cover, where the wall-crawler is caught in the grip of an enormous sand-formed hand while a churning mass of grasping sandy hands surges upward all around him. The image immediately evokes the Sandman's raw, suffocating power in a way that feels both visceral and beautifully rendered. With Brian Michael Bendis writing and Trevor Hairsine on interior art, this 2004 chapter of the Ultimate Six miniseries promises the kind of tense, high-stakes storytelling that made this corner of the Ultimate Marvel universe so compelling.