Ed Hutcheson, tough editor of the New York 'Day', finds that the late owner's heirs are selling the crusading paper to a strictly commercial rival. At first he sees impending unemployment as an opportunity to win back his estranged wife Nora. But when a reporter, pursuing a lead on racketeer Rienzi, is badly beaten, Hutcheson is stung into a full fledged crusade against the gangster, hoping Rienzi can be tied to a woman's murder...in the 3 issues before the end of 'The Day.'

After a long prison sentence Smiler Grogan is heading at high speed to a California park where he hid $350,000 from a job 15 years previously. He accidentally careens over a cliff in view of four cars whose occupants go down to help. The dying Grogan gives details of where the money is buried and when the witnesses fail to agree on sharing the cash, a crazy chase develops across the state.

Caleb Swain and his wife Lutetia are a rich couple deemed to be the most beautiful of all the beautiful people by the press. This changes when Lutetia gives birth to oversize, deformed twins named Wilbur and Eliza. Unknown to them, the twins are really an alien brother-and-sister team implanted in Lutetia to solve the world's problems. When they are apart they are not much smarter than a potted plant, but together they are an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Their closeness is put to the...

Jim Stark is the new kid in town. He has been in trouble elsewhere; that's why his family has had to move before. Here he hopes to find the love he doesn't get from his middle-class family. Though he finds some of this in his relation with Judy, and a form of it in both Plato's adulation and Ray's real concern for him, Jim must still prove himself to his peers in switchblade knife fights and "chickie" games in which cars race toward a seaside cliff.