Strange Adventures #57

A television studio becomes the unlikely setting for an extraterrestrial intrigue in this 1955 DC gem, as Gil Kane and Bernard Sachs's cover drops us right into the action: two unsuspecting men chat near a "Live Your Life Over" TV camera, while lurking behind a curtain is an eerily helmeted figure — clearly the Saturnian spy of the issue's featured story. The juxtaposition of mid-century American television culture against a lurking alien presence gives the cover an irresistible tension, hinting at the imaginative sci-fi storytelling John Broome and Sid Greene bring to "The Spy from Saturn" within. Strange Adventures was firing on all cylinders in 1955, and this issue's premise — an alien hiding in plain sight of a live broadcast — captures exactly the playful paranoia that made the anthology series so enduringly fun.