Kid Colt Outlaw #7

From Marvel's early days of "Wild Western Stories," this 1949 ten-cent adventure puts Kid Colt square in the thick of it — the cover by Russ Heath places the red-shirted outlaw on a wooden boardwalk, caught between a lawman on his left and a gun-wielding tough on his right, with bystanders scrambling in the dusty background. Heath's linework crackles with tension, selling the promise of the story title "Trapped Between Two Fires!" before you've even cracked the spine. Writer Ernie Hart and artist Russ Heath make this a fine slice of postwar Western comics at their most straightforward and satisfying.