Big Town #18

Based on the TV hit show that was drawing audiences in 1952, DC's Big Town #18 delivers a genuinely unsettling cover by Gil Kane and Bernard Sachs: a snarling gangster auctions off the fate of a bound and gagged Steve Wilson to a room full of hat-brimmed criminals, with a knife-wielding thug looming nearby and a tommy gun propped ominously in the background. The speech balloon — "Let's start the auction! Who'll make the first bid to rub out Steve Wilson?" — sets up the story "Target of the Underworld!" with real pulp menace. It's a wonderfully tense ten-cent package for fans of hard-boiled crime comics at their mid-century peak.