Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 49 years ago… This week for RETRO HOT PICKS, Scott and I are selecting comics that came out the week of May 6, 1977. Last time for RETRO HOT PICKS, it was the week of April 29, 1986. Click here to check it out. (Keep in mind that comics came out on multiple days, so these are the issues that went on sale between May 3 and May 9.) So, let’s set the scene: Watergate dominated the nation’s political landscape for so much of the 1970s and on May 4, TV viewers heard Richard Nixon’s side of the story. The first of four installments of Nixon’s infamous sit-down with David Frost aired on syndicated television, drawing an audience of 45,000,000 — a record for a political interview. CBS fought hard to get Nixon but as a credible news organization, refused to pay for the privilege. Instead, the pathologically venal Tricky Dick pocketed $600,000 from Frost’s production company. The four-part, weekly series was such a smash that the producers would come back in the fall with a fifth episode featuring material excised from the initial run. New Yorkers were terrified to go out at night, thanks to a mysterious gunman who was targeting men and women around the city. Known as the .44 Caliber Killer, the serial fiend had last struck in mid-April, killing 20-year-old Alexander Esau and 18-year-old Valentina Suriani, who were shot in a car parked on a Hutchinson River Parkway service road in the Bronx. A handwritten letter was left by the bodies, and police initially kept a lid on it. But some of the contents leaked to the press, and now the public had a new, even more frightening name for the murderer: He called himself the Son of Sam. The killer’s spree fit a city that was suffering through calamitous rot, poverty and filth. But there was no shortage of big personalities that wanted to run it anyway, including Democrats Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo and Bella Abzug, who each wanted to unseat Mayor Abe Beame. (Comparably few cared about the Republican side of things.) But that’s not to say the city wasn’t without its glamor — New York never is. In April, a new nightclub had opened in Midtown Manhattan that drew the glitterati from all over: Studio 54,...