The Spirit #14

The masked man himself takes center stage on this winter 1948 Quality Comics entry, as the Spirit carries a blonde woman in his arms while balancing on a taut wire strung high above a chaotic city street — a knife-wielding thug on one end of the rope, gunfire erupting from a rooftop on the other, and a police car amid the tumult far below. Will Eisner's cover art sells the dizzying vertigo with confident linework and a bold bird's-eye perspective that makes the urban canyon feel genuinely vertiginous. Fifty-two pages of adventure await inside, including "The Alibi Factory," with writing by Manly Wade Wellman and art by Lou Fine.