The Fury of Firestorm #52

Issue #52 of Firestorm the Nuclear Man (October 1986) presents one of the series' most unsettling visual contrasts: the flame-headed Nuclear Man, clad in his familiar red-and-yellow costume, is dwarfed in the crushing grip of a massive, monstrous creature whose green, warted hide and fang-filled snarl suggest something once human but now terrifyingly beyond it. The cover's tagline — "Once, he was human… once, he could have been stopped!" — hangs over the scene like a dire warning, and penciler Joe Brozowski and inker Steve Mitchell give the beast an overwhelming, elemental menace that makes Firestorm's struggle feel genuinely desperate. Writer Gerry Conway's story, "A Giant There Was," promises a confrontation where the stakes feel as outsized as the threat itself.