The Unwritten #19

From Vertigo's thoughtful series about the power of stories, issue #19 opens the "Leviathan Part One" arc with a striking cover by Yuko Shimizu: a young man clutches a copy of Moby-Dick while suspended inside what appears to be a vast, ribbed organic tunnel — perhaps the belly of something enormous — as luminous bubbles drift upward around him. The image beautifully captures the series' central obsession with literature as both refuge and trap, with Tom Taylor literally enveloped by one of fiction's most famous leviathans. Mike Carey and Peter Gross continue their collaboration here, and this 2011 Vertigo issue promises the kind of layered storytelling that makes The Unwritten such a rewarding read.