The Sandman #3

Jack Kirby and Mike Royer's cover for this July 1975 DC issue pulls you straight into the dream realm, showing the red-and-yellow costumed Sandman swooping down on a cloud of mystical mist above a sleeping young woman — while a menacing, shaggy beast wearing a strange metallic headpiece lurks in the shadows nearby. The tagline "Master of Nightmares!" says it all: this is a hero who operates in the strange territory between sleep and danger. Michael Fleisher's story, "The Brain That Blacked-Out the Bronx!," promises the kind of weird, imaginative adventure that made this short-lived series a genuinely distinctive corner of the mid-'70s DC universe.