Conan the Barbarian #27

This June 1973 Marvel issue takes its title — "The Blood-Jewel of Bel-Hissar!" — quite literally on the cover, where Gil Kane and Ernie Chan frame Conan and a dark-haired woman inside the facets of an enormous crimson gemstone, while a snarling, monstrous face looms enormous in the foreground and a smaller vignette of Conan wielding an axe appears above. The sense of scale is striking — that massive jewel dwarfs the figures trapped within it, and the glowering brute pressing in from the right gives the whole image an air of inescapable peril. At twenty cents, this is sword-and-sorcery storytelling with genuine visual ambition.