Strange Adventures #40

This January 1954 DC sci-fi anthology delivers a genuinely unsettling cover penciled by Murphy Anderson and inked by Joe Giella: a figure identified as Captain Comet stands alongside a line of men in matching uniforms who appear to be shrinking and evolving — heads enlarging, bodies diminishing — at the mercy of a floating, saucer-mounted disembodied brain. The brain's chilling boast, "One more jolt of my evolution ray, Captain Comet, and you'll be a giant, bodiless brain… just like me!" sets the stage for the interior tale, "The Mind Monster," written by John Broome with art by Murphy Anderson and inks by Bernard Sachs. Strange Adventures at its mid-50s best — weird science served straight, with just enough dread to make you glad it's fiction.