The Kents #9

Nine issues into DC's twelve-part frontier saga, The Kents opens the story arc "To the Stars by Hard Ways" with a cover by Tom Mandrake that pulls no punches: a pair of hands slams a revolver and a knife down onto a wanted poster — "Dead or Alive, $100,000" — beside a Deputy Marshal's badge resting on a worn wooden table. It's a tightly composed, ground-level image that speaks directly to the tension between law and outlawry at the heart of this series. John Ostrander and Mandrake are clearly not letting up as Superman's frontier ancestors navigate the hardest stretch of the American West yet.