Crime and Justice #5

The cover of this 1952 Charlton issue sets the tension perfectly: a couple — Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Chase — cruise along in a sleek red convertible, blissfully trading honeymoon small talk via speech balloons, while a hat-wearing thug looms up from the back seat with a pistol raised and a disembodied hand intrudes from the top of the frame. It's a wonderfully unsettling snapshot of postwar crime-comics atmosphere, where danger hides beneath the most ordinary-seeming pleasures. With a story titled "The Microspectroscope" waiting inside, Crime and Justice #5 promises the kind of twisty, hard-edged storytelling that made the genre so compelling in the early '50s.