The Rawhide Kid #148

Marvel's long-running western series reaches a genuinely tense moment with issue #148, where the cover — penciled by Gene Colan and inked by Joe Rubinstein — shows the Rawhide Kid crouched low on the ground, disarmed and vulnerable, with an unseen gunman pressing a revolver to his head and barking "Freeze!! One twitch and you're dead!" The bold banner asking "Is This the Final Saga?" adds real dramatic weight to the Kid's desperate situation. With Gary Friedrich writing and Dick Ayers on interior art, this 1978 entry delivers the gritty frontier tension that made this Marvel western a staple of the genre.