Captain Atom #31

Cold War tension crackles through this July 1989 issue, as the cover — penciled and inked by Pat Broderick — drops a battered Captain Atom in the foreground, his silver suit torn and his expression strained, while a massive, looming robotic or armored figure dominates the upper half against a backdrop of Russian onion-domed architecture and flickering flames. The cover's own tagline says it best: "Maybe coming to Russia wasn't such a good idea." With Cary Bates and Greg Weisman scripting alongside interior art by Rafael Kayanan and Romeo Tanghal, "Unwelcome Guests..." promises the kind of superhero-meets-geopolitics storytelling that made late-'80s DC such fertile ground for Cold War drama.