The Silver Surfer #5

Few covers from 1969 capture a sense of desperate peril quite like this one — a massive, snarling blue-skinned villain looms over a stricken Silver Surfer, who lies sprawled on his board amid a burst of fiery energy while a crowd of onlookers fills the city street behind them. John Romita's cover art (pencils and inks) renders both the cosmic and the human scale with striking confidence, the Surfer's gleaming silver form looking alarmingly vulnerable against his towering attacker. The haunting tagline "And Who Shall Mourn For Him?" gives the whole image an elegiac weight that makes this issue of Stan Lee and John Buscema's run genuinely hard to set down.