Captain Marvel Adventures #74

Even the World's Mightiest Mortal can be stumped — this July 1947 Fawcett issue shows Captain Marvel in his red-and-gold uniform peering, hand raised to his brow, at a wall covered in strange, nearly illegible handwriting, the cover daring readers to decipher it themselves with a built-in optical trick. C. C. Beck's clean, expressive linework gives the scene a genuinely unsettling edge, turning a cryptic message on a crumbling wall into something far more ominous than it first appears. With Bill Woolfolk writing and Pete Costanza on interior art, "The Fate of the World" promises that whatever those scrawled words say, the stakes couldn't be higher.