Outer Space #20

This December 1958 Charlton anthology captures the era's wide-eyed wonder at the cosmos, with cover pencils by Dick Giordano delivering a genuinely striking scene: a green-suited astronaut with a backpack and equipment belt cautiously edges along the floor of what appears to be an alien spacecraft, a vast star-filled void — complete with ringed planets and glowing orbs — visible through a circular portal behind him. Looming in the foreground is a large, yellow-skinned alien with enormous dark eyes and an unsettling grin, its gaze fixed on the unaware spaceman. It's a perfectly composed moment of tension that makes "The Greater Jovians," written by Joe Gill with interior art by Steve Ditko, a fine example of late-'50s science-fiction comics at their most imaginative.