Vengeance #5

The penultimate chapter of Marvel's six-part Vengeance limited series arrives with a cover by Gabriele Dell'Otto that pulls no punches: Red Skull fills nearly the entire frame, his scarlet face rendered in rich, painterly detail, sneering with cold menace directly at the reader. That tagline — "Good versus evil… tough to tell the difference, if you ask me" — sets the tone perfectly for "The Twelfth Hour," the second-to-last chapter in Joe Casey, Nick Dragotta, and Brad Simpson's morally tangled 2012 series. With only one issue left after this, the tension heading into the finale couldn't feel more fitting.