Four Color #1256

Dell's 1962 adventure series kicks off with Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle, and Tom Beecham's painted cover sets the tone immediately — a muscular, loincloth-clad warrior raises a stone hammer to defend a fallen companion against an enormous, jaws-wide dinosaur lunging from the foreground, while a second reptilian predator looms ominously through the jungle palms behind them. The tagline "…Modern Man versus Ancient Beast!!" says it all, promising the kind of primal, pulse-quickening conflict that made Dell's adventure titles so appealing in the early 1960s. Sam Glanzman handles the interior art on "Meeting Kona," bringing the same raw, untamed energy to the story that Beecham delivers so vividly on the cover.