The Phantom Zone #3

The third chapter of DC's four-issue Phantom Zone mini-series promises a very bad day for Superman, and the cover — penciled by Gene Colan and inked by Dick Giordano — delivers that idea with wry, unsettling flair. Three vertical panels walk us through an escalating nightmare: first Superman facing a flame-crowned villainess, then cradling a helpless Earth while a smirking fiery entity looms overhead, and finally a battered Man of Steel reeling amid an explosion of green debris as the entity screams in triumph, punctuated by the deadpan caption "…everything seems to go wrong?" Steve Gerber's story, "The Terror beyond Twilight!", with interior art by Gene Colan and Tony De Zuniga, carries the promise of that cover's slow-burn dread straight into 1982's most inventive Superman corner of the DC Universe.