Captain Atom #43

The cover of Captain Atom #43 sets a genuinely unsettling tone: a silver-suited, white-haired Captain Atom surges upward wreathed in atomic fire, his fist raised in defiance — all while a massive, skull-faced creature with bulging green eyes looms behind him, enormous rocky hands closing in. Pat Broderick's cover art gives the confrontation real weight, and the tagline — "It is a race. It is a battle. It is the struggle for a man's soul." — makes clear the stakes go well beyond a simple punch-up. Written by Cary Bates and Greg Weisman with interior art by Rafael Kayanan and Romeo Tanghal, this 1990 DC issue looks like one of the series' more viscerally charged entries.