Adventure Comics #178

Straight from 1952, this DC ten-center poses a genuinely unsettling question right on its cover: what happens when the Boy of Steel is forced to become "The Boy in the Lead Mask"? Win Mortimer's cover art depicts Superboy stumbling helplessly along a street, his entire head encased in a solid lead mask he cannot remove, while two smirking villains in the foreground gleefully note that he's "blind as a bat." It's a wonderfully imaginative visual predicament — the full Superman costume paired with that featureless metal block of a head — that makes this Curt Swan–illustrated issue a fun snapshot of Silver Age storytelling at its most inventive.