Scary Tales #20

Charlton's Scary Tales #20 delivers a genuinely unsettling cover by Joe Staton, depicting a lone figure in a white suit dwarfed by a massive, fanged alien creature whose writhing yellow-and-green tentacles fill nearly every inch of the frame. The monster's gaping maw dominates the composition, radiating a sickly menace that sets the tone perfectly for the horrors within. With Joe Gill writing and Jimmy Janes on interior art, this June 1979 anthology is a fine example of Charlton doing what it did best — packing real dread into 40 cents.