Men's Adventures #17

Men's Adventures #17 brings Atlas Comics' promise of "Warfare • Suspense • Danger" to vivid life in this December 1952 issue, with a cover by Sol Brodsky and Carl Burgos laid out in four dramatic panels. The sequence follows enemy soldiers — their speech rendered in Chinese characters alongside English translations — as they plant explosives, a massive blast erupts beneath hapless figures caught in the open, and finally a helmeted Marine crouches with a weapon and a detonator box, coolly declaring that you've "gotta get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart the Marines." It's a tense, well-staged cover that captures the cat-and-mouse suspense of the Korean War era at its ten-cent best.