Kid Colt Outlaw #180

Marvel's frontier hero meets something far stranger than outlaws in Kid Colt Outlaw #180 (1974), featuring the story "The Giant Monster of Midnight Valley!" The cover — penciled by Jack Kirby with inks by Dick Ayers and Mike Esposito — puts Kid Colt and his horse in the grip of an enormous, ape-like creature in a red costume, levitating them with some kind of energy beam while futuristic machinery looms in the foreground. It's a wild collision of Western and science-fiction that makes this 20-cent issue a genuinely compelling snapshot of Marvel's adventurous genre-blending spirit in the early '70s.