Venom: The Madness #2

The middle chapter of "The Madness" trilogy arrives with a cover by Kelley Jones that's genuinely hard to look away from — a wildly distorted Venom, his symbiote tendrils erupting in every direction, clashes head-on with a powerfully built red-costumed figure against a blazing orange sky. Jones's artwork pushes both figures to dramatic extremes, with Venom's elongated fangs and multiplying faces giving the confrontation an unsettling, almost hallucinatory energy that fits the "Paranoia" subtitle perfectly. With Ann Nocenti writing and this being part two of three, the tension is clearly building toward something intense.