Venus #17

Atlas Comics' supernatural anthology series reaches a genuinely unsettling pitch with this December 1951 issue, cover-penciled and -inked by Bill Everett. The cover drops us into a grim stone chamber where a blonde woman in red strains against her bonds, a crouching man recoils in horror, scattered skeletons litter the floor, and a darkly dressed woman watches from a shadowed archway — all beneath a bat-winged shape lurking overhead. The cover's own tagline says it best: "There was only one way to learn the horrible secret of the Tower of Death — you had to die, first!