Captain Marvel Jr. #73

This May 1949 Fawcett offering poses a genuinely intriguing puzzle right on its cover by Kurt Schaffenberger: a great jagged lightning bolt divides the scene between Captain Marvel Jr. in his blue-and-gold uniform, fists clenched and airborne, and a stern young man in a brown suit clutching papers and a cane — both seemingly lifted off the ground as gravity itself appears to give way. The cover's tagline, "The World's Mightiest Boy Fights the Mystery of the Day Gravity Stopped!", hints at a wonderfully strange science-fiction premise that pairs CMJ's superheroic intensity with something far more unsettling than a typical villain. Packed with 52 pages for just a dime, this is a fine example of the imaginative energy that made Fawcett's Golden Age lineup so endlessly entertaining.