The Brave and the Bold #79

This September 1968 team-up from DC's The Brave and the Bold pairs Batman with the ghostly Deadman in "The Track of the Hook" — and Neal Adams's cover makes the stakes bracingly clear. Deadman, in his red acrobat's costume, cries out in anguish while a green-clad villain looms above with a hook-ended weapon and a fallen Batman struggles at his feet, with the cover's speech bubble spelling out the gut-punch irony: Deadman's quest to find his own killer may be costing the Dark Knight his life. Adams handles both pencils and inks here, and the result is a beautifully tense composition that showcases why his work energized DC's late-'60s output alongside writer Bob Haney's reliably inventive storytelling.