Four Color #5

Few aviation adventure comics captured the thrill of flight quite like Smilin' Jack, and this 1940 Dell issue — 68 pages, all in color — delivers that excitement right on the cover. Zack Mosley's art puts you in the middle of a white-knuckle mid-air struggle, with a goggled pilot at the controls of a swooping red aircraft while a desperate figure clings to the plane's fuselage, dangling perilously against a billowing cloudy sky. For a dime, readers in 1940 got a hefty full-color package built around one of the era's most daring aviator heroes.