I’ve mentioned before how the Silver Age tended to produce strange, dream-like covers. There was a time when the best strategy to allure Batman readers seemed to be to give them colorful images that resembled the hallucinations of an euphoric mind obsessed with bizarre creatures. This obsession was probably linked to the popularity of 1950s’ sci-fi monster films, including such gems as Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World, Gordon Douglas’ Them!, and Nathan H. Juran’s 20 Million Miles to Earth.
As far as the Dynamic Duo was concerned, the resulting covers – drawn by artists like Curt Swan and Dick Dillin – were trippy as hell, featuring all kinds of fantastic beasts, as you can see in these ten amazing examples:
(This last one is actually from the Bronze Age, but it fits so well that I just couldn’t resist.)