Aquaman #16

Down Among the Dead" sets the tone perfectly for this May 2004 chapter of Will Pfeifer's run, with cover art by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer depicting Aquaman — in his gold-scaled costume — struggling desperately as a mass of decaying, reaching corpses surge up around him from the deep. The sheer number of hollow-eyed undead clawing at the King of the Seas makes for a genuinely unsettling underwater tableau, and Davis's fluid linework captures both dread and grim determination on Aquaman's face. "American Tidal, Part 2" promises a story that takes the oceanic hero somewhere darker than usual.