Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth #16

The cover of this April 1974 DC issue drops you straight into chaos: a determined, blond-haired Kamandi clutches a rifle as he fights his way through a corridor of cages labeled "Experimental Animals Research Lab," with desperate, feral humans pressing against the bars all around him and hulking animal figures closing in from the foreground. Jack Kirby's pencils, inked by D. Bruce Berry, pack every inch of the image with raw urgency and that unmistakable sense of a world turned upside down. The cover's tantalizing tagline — "An eerie tale of two doctors… one of them is a gorilla!" — sets the stage for the kind of strange, inventive storytelling that made Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth one of DC's most imaginative series of the early '70s.